Misadventures In Online Journalism 133
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.'"
On posting (Score:5, Insightful)
Better late than wrong. Better never than stupid.
Not the biggest problem we face in journalism (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wait (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Dan Rather *still* works as a "journalist" (Score:1, Insightful)
And "journalists" as a whole have YET to excoriate him for passing off as authentic documents in the exact same font as the default of MS Word [wikipedia.org] that were faxed in from a random Kinkos by a nutcase with an ax to grind.
That should tell us all we need to know about journalistic "standards".
Since a real-life big steaming pile of feces from a male cow doesn't try to pass itself off as something better, I'd say calling journalism a "bullshit job" is an insult to bullshit.
Re:Lies do move fast in the Modern Age (Score:0, Insightful)
Sure, because they're badass hard-ass thugs, yo, and sportsmanship be da weakness to 'dem. In other words, this is another fine African-American contribution to society. Not to be outdone, they later came up with gangsta rap, thug culture, and ebonics and found that major corporations like MTV were only too happy to sell the latest idiocy to suburban white kids who think they know what the ghetto is like. But it's okay, because George Washington Carver was really good with peanuts a hundred years ago.
Really though. There ARE successful black businessmen and philantropists and intellectuals. You know why they don't become household names and role models while the thug element does? Because they're not the image that is being deliberately and systematically promoted.
Some journalists check their facts, others don't (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [nasw.org] 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/ [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.
Re:Facts? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wait (Score:2, Insightful)
A journalist is a researcher with an additional goal: to provide the general public with the results. Nothing more, nothing less.
I think the biggest problem that you (and many others) are experiencing is that you (and they) expect journalists to report to your biases, rather than the public's, or their own. For example, there are a great many people out there who want to hear about the investigations into terrorist activities, but to a smaller minority, this is perceived as fearmongering to sell papers. Yes, it is superficially to sell papers, but there fear was there first, and it's the public who want that fear addressed.
If your biases aren't mainstream enough, then journalism is just going to seem like a bunch of bullshit.
Re:Wait (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Slashdot is one of the worst culprits (Score:2, Insightful)
Here is a recent example [slashdot.org]; 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.
Re:Not the biggest problem we face in journalism (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually you'll find that if you omit suicides from the calculation people hardly ever shoot themselves or loved ones. All these studies count suicide but don't come right out and say it because the people behind them have an agenda - to prove to us that guns are bad through omission.
That you quoted a report that includes the suicidal and didn't mention it, makes me wonder if the wool hasn't been pulled over your own eyes. Then again, the first linked article explicitly quotes Daniel Webster and if you had any grounding in reality and knowledge of his insidious agenda you'd probably not have made that error.
Almost without exception, when a state recognizes the right of its citizenry to carry concealed, crime goes down. Usually, it goes WAY down. However take away the guns, and more people get shot (Australia is a great example of this) or stabbed and the journalists out there don't ever seem to make this correlation.
Re:On posting (Score:5, Insightful)
About a month ago MSNBC did a story about racist white men carrying guns at a presidential speech, and showed supposed video of these white guys with guns. It was later learned MSNBC's video was of a *black* man.
There doesn't seem to be any negative repercussion for MSNBC's "mistakes". They just keep raking in the dollars.
Re:Not the biggest problem we face in journalism (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm a bit skeptical since I recently heard the local forensic pathologist speak about gun shot wounds. Apparently, most of them in my city are due to gang violence, domestic violence, and hunting accidents. The first two seem that they'd strongly influence the aforementioned study. Demographics also come into play, since something like 15-20% of Americans are uninsured compared to 90% of gun shot victims. That said, the pathologist was fairly anti-gun ownership (unsurprising given his job). His data made me lean in the opposite direction though.
But, since I don't want to get too caught up with trying to minimize a single piece of evidence, how does pointing to that single piece of evidence refute the GP's point about selection omission? If you want a decent demonstration of that effect, Google "Kennesaw, Georgia". It's a town that enacted a mandatory gun ownership law in the '80s and had crime rates drop. Surely this is a notable point in the gun debate, but seems to be rarely mentioned outside of conservatives preaching to the choir.
Re:functional reputation systems (Score:1, Insightful)
The press are already manipulated for political gain on occasion. This system would make it worse because it would allow a rumor to gain authenticity. Remember the most recent rumor about death panels in the health care debate? Imagine that misinformation being splashed across the front page of the NYT. Enough people believed the lie it would have happened in this situation.
Facts are not a democracy, though a lot of people seem to think they are. You see this all the time in evolution debates where someone will cite a poll about how few people believe evolution is true as evidence that evolution is false.
Re:Dan Rather *still* works as a "journalist" (Score:3, Insightful)
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...