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Misadventures In Online Journalism
An anonymous reader writes "Paul Carr, writing for TechCrunch, has posted his take on some of the flaws inherent to today's fast-paced news ecosystem, where bloggers often get little or no editorial feedback and interesting headlines are passed around faster than ever. His article was inspired by a recent story on ZDNet that accused Yahoo of sharing the names and emails of 200,000 users with the Iranian government; a report that turned out to be false, yet generated a great deal of outrage before it was disproved. Carr writes, 'Trusting the common sense of your writers is all well and good — but when it comes to breaking news, where journalistic adrenaline is at its highest and everyone is paranoid about being scooped by a competitor, that common sense can too easily become the first casualty. Journalists get caught up in the moment; we get excited and we post stupid crap from a foreign language student blog and call it news. And then within half a minute — bloggers being what they are — the news gets repeated and repeated until it becomes fact. Fact that can affect share prices or ruin lives. This is the reality of the blogosphere, where Churchill's remark: that "a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on" is more true, and more potentially damaging, than at any time in history.'"
Better late than wrong. Better never than stupid.
Journalists get caught up in the moment; we get excited and we post stupid crap from a foreign language student blog and call it news. And then within half a minute -- bloggers being what they are -- the news gets repeated and repeated until it becomes fact. Fact that can affect share prices or ruin lives.
That doesn't even address how that problem compounds when the news organization in question has a political agenda or has their talking points of the day handed down from political operatives in exile. There's no allegiance to the truth or journalistic integrity. Fact checking is secondary to staying on message, even if the facts get kicked around in the process. No corrections for stories that turn out to be false, no apologies when lives (or countries) are ruined. It's not a news organization, it's a front for propaganda.
I think a news organization promoting itself as say fair and balanced while hiding an agenda behind a veneer of respectability is far greater threat to both individuals and the country than the occasional weekend early release accident.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Yes, it's a bullshit job. Then again, so is being a programmer, lawyer, salesman, investment banker, teacher.... Everybody thinks every other profession is less valuable than their own.
Not all journalism is good, just like not all programmers are good. But journalism is not a bullshit job. There are some bad ones out there, but the very idea of journalism is reporting, not interpreting, and that is an extremely valuable service. If you would like your information thoroughly researched and verified experimentally then good luck trying to negotiate the real fast-paced world where getting the latest information has strategic value.
This is not a defense of sloppy reporting or for not verifying sources and facts, it's mostly a rebuttal to an incredibly broad and useless generalization about the profession of journalism.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
No wonder that this sort of article is posted on Techcrunch, those guys clearly have a lot of experience in that regard! ;-)
And no, I do not want to flame, they even use an older Techcrunch story as an example in TFA. They really speak from experience.
It is ironic that the summery which blasts the misinformation of bloggers gets quote attribution wrong: "A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on" is usually attributed to Mark Twain but the quotation was delivered in a sermon titled "Joesph attacked by the archers" in 1855 by C. H. Spurgeon! - Most misinformation I guess. ;-) - http://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/0017.htm
I've been a journalist since 1978, and the most important thing I learned was to go back to the source and check my facts. Most bloggers don't check their facts. But don't feel bad. A lot of New York Times reporters don't check their facts either.
Every journalist learns quickly that you hear some shocking story, you call up the accused to check it out, and the story often turns out to be misleading, misinterpreted, wrong or downright lie (think weapons of mass destruction).
I write about medicine. I once did a story on needle exchange programs. http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/needlex.htm The scientific evidence seemed overwhelming that needle exchanges saved lives, but a lot of doctors, and politicians, were obstructing them. I spoke to Herbert Kleber, who was supposed to be one of the bad guys who was obstructing them. To my surprise, he had changed his position because of the weight of the scientific evidence. Happens all the time. But I see bloggers attacking people for things they don't actually believe, because they didn't check their facts.
We old guys have been working to develop what you now call the Internet for >60 years. Independent journalists like George Seldes and I.F. Stone used to do a great job, and we were looking forward to the great day when a lone journalist could publish a newsletter without printing and postage costs. It's been good and bad.
The most obvious flaw that I notice in blogs is that most of them -- but not all -- don't check their facts. It's a big game of telephone. Some blogger cuts and pastes a paragraph from another blog, which came from another blog ... which came from the New York Times. I can read the NYT myself. If you want to add value to that story, you can check the NYT's facts, and in my experience, you have a pretty good chance of finding them wrong. Make a fucking phone call to the original source and see if the NYT got it right. Or check out a different source. If you want a lesson in journalism, examine their health care reform coverage.
It's like replicating DNA. A bunch of enzymes copies a stand of DNA, and then another bunch of enzymes checks the duplicated strand to make sure it's copied right. If you don't have error-checking enzymes, you wind up with (sometimes disastrous) mistakes.
There are a lot of blogs that are written by people who have such a good command of the facts, have such expertise, that they're not likely to make mistakes -- they've already checked out the facts, for their academic work or their books, like Juan Cole and Glen Greenwald.
But most journalists aren't experts. They have to check their facts with the experts. That's the game. No matter how smart I am, I interview and quote somebody who knows more than me.
The best Internet journalism that I follow is http://www.democracynow.org/ Notice how Democracy Now interviews people on the other side all the time.
A blogger who does nothing more than copy a story from a major news source like the NYT, or, even worse, from a blogger who wouldn't meet the reliable source standards of Wikipedia, is just adding noise, not useful information.
If you want to add useful information to the Internet, you're not going to find it on the Internet, obviously. Call up an expert and get some new information. And then call up an expert who disagrees with him, to make sure he hasn't given you a sales job.
That's why I only trust Slashdot to bring me tech journalism of the highest integrity.
This guy's the limit!
Ever hear the saying "Tell a lie often enough and it will become true?" That's what TFA is talking about.
It's not that it actually -is- true, it's obviously not. But people believe and act on the lie as if it were true, so it might as well be as far as anybody but those who know the truth is concerned. Retractions are often met with skepticism, making getting the truth out much more difficult.
It's like in the office, if someone starts a rumor that Suzie has been giving the boss a little "extra service" after hours, and neither Suzie nor the boss hear about it until after it has spread around the whole company, it is too late to stop it. There likely isn't any solid proof one way or another, and anyway the truth does not spread like a lie does. You don't get a wildfire of "Did you hear Suzie really hasn't been doing anything with the boss?" spreading around, it just doesn't happen. So at the very least the lie has damaged Suzie's reputation the most in our culture, but if it goes far enough Management could decide to fire one or both of them based on the rumor.
Sensationalist journalism is simply the office rumor magnified a thousand times, with the potential for destructin a thousand times greater.
It would be really great if people just regarded everything they heard with a nice big dose of skepticism. "Yahoo released 200,000 people's identity info? Says who?" That would be a great start, because when it turns out it's some guy with a blog, who got his info from some kid with a blog in another country, the credibility starts to drop and people stop believing it.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I'd say calling journalism a "bullshit job" is an insult to bullshit.
You know -- if there was a foundation representing the rights of male cow fecal matter I would apologize this instant. I'm serious -- you make a very valid point.
I am the lawn!
peer-weighted reputation...
Peer-weighted reputation, like "web of trust" systems, won't work if the "peers" are anonymous. Otherwise, we get link farms and similar forms of bulk spamming.
Even without anonymity, imagine Rush's "dittoheads" as a source of authority for news.
Oh the irony. Slashdot posts a story about bloggers not checking their stories and says:
"This is the reality of the blogosphere, where Churchill's remark: that "a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on" is more true, and more potentially damaging, than at any time in history.'"
It looks like you didn't check your reference, like the bloggers you accuse.
It seems that the original quote was by British Prime Minister Jim Callaghan in the 1970s, not Winston Churchill, and he said "boots" not "pants".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3288907.stm
In the UK "pants" means "underwear" and not "trousers" as in the USA. Was Callaghan taking a quote from Churchill talking about underwear? I don't know. I'd welcome further reference hunting....
It's not useless. What passes for journalism nowadays is rehashing wire feeds and making reports that are editorial in nature. Perception shaping is where the profession is, and always was. It's just that they have been dropping the facade with increasing rapidity, or the quality of graduates is declining.
Journalism is about lickspittle flacks following Obama around. It's about telling us what and how to think. It's a bunch of Judith Millers and Jeff Gannons all scrambling over each other to lick the pus infested butthole of the people in power, in hopes of getting another paycheck. And as they are realizing their model is irrelevant, and the people they wanted to sell dead trees to aren't interested in their rehashed, editorial thought shaping, they are begging to be put on the dole so society won't crumble when they are gone! That's fucking audacity.
I am agnostic, and the only news source I even slightly trust these days is the CSM. They seem to realize that reportage is important, and we can make the editorials up in our mind. Other news I get over shortwave radio and the internet, but I don't really trust it. However I would trust Pravda over the New York Times any day.
Yes, there are some journalists who try their damnedest to report what they see, and attempt to do so with integrity. But they are mostly working for bullshit artists of the first rate.
Here is a recent example; the 128-bit Windows troll by Barry Collins at PC Pro.
There has never been a "Robert Morgan" working at Microsoft Research. The Google cache version of the LinkedIn profile cited in the article states that he attended "Glendale University." A modicum of effort researching this will reveal that Glendale University is an unaccredited online degree supplier that sells you a "degree" for "what you already know."
In other words, that 128-bit Windows story was a complete and total troll. Anybody who even attempted to do any fact-checking would have discovered this within 30 seconds. I still don't see an admission of error and an apology from the PC Pro or the Slashdot editors appended to the article.
A quick intertubes search reveals this quote is well over 150 years old and is really more of a proverb than a quote.
But yeah, the OP did abuse is pretty badly.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Er, not to mention that the claim was valid, even if the documents weren't.
Dan Rather got dinged because he cited the wrong source in his proof that objects fall to Earth, which happened to be politically unpopular at the time...
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.