News Experiment To Rely Only On Facebook, Twitter

snydeq writes "With a setup ripped right out of a reality show — or, perhaps more fittingly, The Shining — a French-language public broadcasters association will put five journalists in a French farmhouse for five days, giving them no access to newspapers, television, radio, or the Internet, save Facebook and Twitter, to see how much world news they can report. The reporters will report this news on a communal blog. 'Our aim is to show that there are different sources of information and to look at the legitimacy of each of these sources,' said France Inter editor Helene Jouan. 'This experiment will enable us to take a hard look at all the myths that exist about Facebook and Twitter.'"

Only 5 days

[Mr. Freeman]

5 days hardly seems long enough to conduct a serious study. You have to take into account the fact that these journalists are going to be working in an environment completely different from what they're used to. It's going to take them a while to adapt to being cut off from their regular tools before they can report anything properly, assuming that it's possible at all.

Re:Not much of a study.

[tomhath]

Aside from you grossly misstating what the article actually says, the citation you provide makes it clear why Fox viewers are "wrong". Essentially the authors state what (in their opinion) is the correct answer and if you don't agree with their very left wing view of the world then you are wrong.

An in-depth analysis of a series of polls conducted June through September found 48% incorrectly believed that evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda have been found, 22% that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and 25% that world public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq. Overall 60% had at least one of these three misperceptions.

There have been plenty of reports that Saddam and Bin Laden had been in contact [guardian.co.uk]. Although the contact is now assumed to be minimal, it's a far cry from "Saddam was the brains behind 9/11". And I question whether someone who believes there was no contact is "right".

Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction. He used them to kill thousands of people. None were found after the invasion, but whether a response is right or wrong depends a lot on how the question was phrased. Believing "weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq" is different than Saddam "had loads of weapons of mass destruction in 2003 that we recovered"

Finally, world opinion was mixed to the invasion. Thirty six countries were involved in the invasion so it's hard to claim that "world public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq" is completely wrong. More countries opposed the invasion that supported it, but opinion was at least mixed. Unless of course you get your news from NPR.