#IStandWithLisa

In case you missed the ferfuffle in the land of cancer blogging and tweeting, allow me to fill you in. Ann also wrote about this and you can see her opinion over here as well.

Lisa Bonchek Adams has stage IV breast cancer and tweets a lot about her life with cancer. You can follow her @adamslisa on Twitter or her blog. She is living her life as best she can and talks about it on line through tweets and blog posts.

Then along came Emma, who we will call the Idiot for lack of a better term, who wrote for the Guardian and compared tweeting to funeral selfies - really? Hence the name. What she wrote was taken down by the Guardian after a day or two but you can read it here. (See things on the Internet never really go away).

The Idiot complains that Lisa tweets too much. Is that really possible? Some people have conversations and dialogues on Twitter so they might have a high volume of tweets. So what?

And the complaint that of over exposure on twitter becomes a funeral selfie? She is not dead so its not a funeral.

So anyway, the Idiot's column was posted and then many complaints were received and it was taken down because the Guardian said it did not meet their standards.

That was bad enough and then Mr Idiot (her husband) wrote for the New York Times comparing Lisa's fight to I'm not sure what. He did talk about his father's death from cancer in England a few years ago and medical costs but it was fairly pointless in my opinion.

When I first read these articles and the blog posts about them from others in cancer land, I wondered have these two journalism professionals (Mr. and Mrs. Idiot) ever bother to talk to Lisa directly? I do not think so. I could be wrong but their writings were not about Lisa but about her tweets. In professional journalism, isn't it appropriate to contact the subject of their writings? I mean again I could be wrong but in terms of verifying information and all that, isn't that correct?

So I stand with Lisa on this. And Mr and Mrs can go take a hike.