The reputation and credibility of online media suffered a major blow as Wired News admitted it had to pull three stories by a freelancer after investigating doubts about some of the writer’s sources.
No, wait…
The reputation and credibility of mainstream media suffered a major blow as photo agency Reuters revealed that a Lebanese freelance photograph had photoshopped an image of the aftermath of bombing in Beirut.
No, wait…
You get the idea. Every time someone’s moral failings come into play in media (online or off) it signals the end of credibility, a body blow to the entire sector of the media, etc. etc. etc.
Let’s get real, and get over this. The individual failing of one person, usually enabled by laxness on the part of higher-ups, isn’t great news but neither is it the end of the world nor an indication of some deep, dark conspiracy nor a telling indicator of the overall failings of media nor an example of standard operating principles nor anything else as grand and sweeping.
Most times it’s a small, sad story of the type that is bound to happen when you have human beings involved in just about anything. We can regret it, learn (and teach) from it, accept that it will happen again (in newspapers, at TV stations, in online publications, in blogs, etc.) … all valid ways of dealing with it. Turning each individual failing into a symbol for grand, overall failing is just plain silly.
TAGS: NEWSPAPERS, CREDIBILITY
I think that trying to slot Wired News into ‘mainstream’ or ‘online’ categorites is bogus. Besides the obvious crossover with Reuters doing good business feeding websites, and Wired News copy showing up in print, there’s something more important at play. Both Reuters and Wired are conventional news organizations — with anachronisms like assignment desks, editors, fact-checkers, standards, and the idea that contributors should be held accountable for their work. In that respect, they’re much more closely related to each other than they are to the blog/wiki/”citizen journalism” world.
The latter has a much higher tolerance for sloppy reporting and a disturbingly laissez-faire attitude towards bad writing and editing. (There’s also the issue of popular blogs and sites having a vocal community of supporters to drown out inconvenient facts with a torrent of abuse. The Internet might hate a bully, but it loves an angry mob.)
I daresay that a conentional news organization is a lot more likely to take corrective action when they’ve run a story with bad information than a blog in the same situation would be. A bunch of blogs on the other side of a divide saying “NO! You’re spouting rubbish!” is a bad substitute for really answering for mistakes; same with merely correcting bad information on a wiki.
Your point that this is going to happen from time to time when humans are involved is spot on. It’s how the organization reacts when they are caught out by false reports that’s important — there are ‘old media’ publishers that I’ve just as much contempt for as I do for partisan blogs.
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