Back in August, Torill was having trouble with her voicebox and wrote a post about her worries that she might lose her voice, finishing with this paragraph:

Yes, I am scared today. Scared enough that I am deeply unhappy about the male locker-room humour of our staff room, which I thought the last 15 years had made me deaf to. The day after tomorrow I may have a wonder drug in my hands and an arrogant laughter in my throat.

Today a journalist in her local newspaper has published a piece accusing her of unethical blogging, titled “Attacked colleagues in blog”. According to the journalist and his (of course) anonymous sources, Torill leaked internal information from a staff meeting” on her blog and accused her colleagues of “toilet-humour”.

The journalist doesn’t link to the actual blog post. Instead he quotes a mistranslated sentence out of context, making it sound as though it’s part of a long post detailing, naming and shaming her colleagues.

Who’s unethical here? Torill, for writing a line in a post about something completely different where she admits that she was upset at a meeting? (Note: she doesn’t say what happened in the meeting or who was involved.) Or the journalist for using his traditional authority in a print publication and his journalistic right to protect his anonymous sources and for misquoting her out of context? Why can a journalist publish a story like that and not even provide a link to the blog post the story centres on? With a link to that post, it would be obvious it was a non-story.

As Torill points out in a post this morning, it’s really hardly surprising that there’s a bit of locker-room humour in a department where until this semester she was been the only woman for fifteen years. That some of those men then anonymously get a journalist to attack her for saying so is, well, past absurd, don’t you think?