From this week’s Wall Street Journal, a “story” about mommy bloggers who hate their home lives so much that they just can’t wait to get away and hang with their friends at conferences where they pretend to be “working.”

And in case the article didn’t make it clear how shallow and unprofessional women are, the helpful graphics team at the WSJ came up with these lovely cartoons.

I was happy to see the blogosphere erupt when the piece came out, but it was reading the response from Katherine Stone, the woman whose words the writer may or may not have twisted to support the argument she was trying to make with the story, that prompted me to post here.

As a reporter, it is so difficult to take a story idea and, in the course of reporting, ask the right questions, listen very carefully to the answers that you are given and then let that original story idea evolve into what the story actually is. You can never interview every single person whom a certain trend or issue affects, so reporters often have to blindly trust — and gain the trust of — the people they interview, and it is one of any reporter’s biggest fears to misinterpret what someone is saying and then, in turn, misrepresent that person in print.

I’d like to think that this story was all one big misunderstanding, but those graphics — I swear to you I have never eaten food out of a hotel fridge like that — made it clear that this just isn’t the case.