From Cyberjournalist.net:
A number of Canadian television news broadcasts aired a user-submitted video clip falsely labelled as a ferry battling rough seas in the Cabot Strait [up here in Canada], reviving questions about how news organizations handle user-submitted content. The reports prompted some passengers to cancel their bookings.
There are a number of things that can be said about this beyond the “questions about how news organizations handle user-submitted content.”
One may be that it reveals, again, that one of the attributes journalists most-often cite as a strength — skepticism — is more honoured in word than act.
(The CP article about the embarrassment does say that two reporters who were tasked with checking out the video, each thought the other was contacting the Maritime ferry company. Can newsrooms really be understaffed when there are two reporters who are available to be assigned to the same rather straight-forward task?)
Another is that this chips away at the argument that it is legacy media that stands between us and the messy world of “fact” that the internet has unleashed. Yes, I trust legacy media to serve as a screen, to cut through clutter and untruth to present real information. But it is not a matter of faith that they will always get it right (reporters and editors are people, after all) or that the media is the only guard against mistruth, mistake, hoax and outright lying.
TAGS: MEDIA
