There are stories that we see on twitter or on the internet that seem to be legitimate stories. For instance, during the Duke-Miami game, I saw on twitter that there were apparently rumors that LSU Head Football Coach Les Miles had an affair with a student and was going to resign.
This story was not too dissimilar from the rumors about former Arkansas Head Football Coach Bobby Petrino and the affair that he had with a football staffer. The rumors turned out to be false. I did not buy into the story and I looked at other news organizations like ESPN and CBS Sports and Deadspin for confirmation. I didn't see them looking into it and determined that the rumors were probably bogus. I ended up being right.
The second story that came up months ago was about possible improprieties committed by New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez. There seemed to be more in depth reporting here and it came from CNN which is a very reputable news source. Today, a woman that claimed that Senator Menendez paid her to have sex with him confessed that she had never even met him. The rest of the story as it pertains to Menendez possibly helping a campaign donor get a lucrative contract in the Dominican Republic could still be true. But it was a mistake on my part because I felt by re-tweeting the story, I was helping to contribute to the misinformation.
Please let me know about a time when you saw a story and whether or not you assumed that it was true or whether or not you did some additional digging. Have you ever tried to inform people about a story that ended up not being true?
This kind of thing is so common especially on Twitter. Twitter allows anyone to be a journalist. If they see something, they can tweet about it. It also entitles everyone to their opinion. Moreover, since it's so timely, it is easy to make mistakes because of the pressure of the 24-7 news cycle on the Internet.
ReplyDeleteThe VMAs last year comes to mind, where I saw someone retweet TMZ with the headline reading something like: Rapper Lil Wayne arrested backstage of VMAs. This of course turned out to be false, but since it wasn't a random person making the claim but TMZ, I retweeted it too. It was quickly deleted after it was found to be false, and as expected, Lil Wayne came out to perform.
That's the thing with twitter. Although retweets are not endorsements, you are distributing that news to your followers with the easiest click of a button. Therefore, it's important to check our sources as journalists, instead of acting impulsively on social networks.
I realize that I'm in an extremely small minority of people who aren't fans of Twitter. Sometimes I think it's contributing to the decline of the industry. For instance, we're always instructed to use it as a reporting tool like live-tweeting quotes from an event, but live-tweeting means that we are literally just transcribing what people say, publishing without fact-checking it first. Furthermore, if we simply just use Twitter as a convenient way to transcribe quotes, then it sort of diminishes the story. Why would people read the 800-word piece when they've got the highlights in a few 140-character snapshots? While I can appreciate Twitter's upsides, I have to say I'm not exactly thrilled about the direction of an industry that seems to be more predicated on "dumb-ing it down" than ever before.
ReplyDeleteEven with the caveat "retweets are not endorsements," I'm inclined to think that the line is not as concrete as many would like it to be. We really can't just retweet and say 'hey don't shoot the messenger, it's a retweet' in the same way that we can't just broadcast content then attribute it to another news organization without confirming the information ourselves. Circumventing blame or using a source as a scapegoat does not cleanse us of an ethical responsibility to seek the truth and minimize harm.
That being said, I nearly posted a link to an article without looking for confirmation just the other day. Upset over the notion that Portuguese-Americans would be declared Hispanic in the 2020 Census, I was probably five seconds away from posting this article from The Portugal News. http://www.theportugalnews.com/news/portuguese-americans-against-being-declared-hispanic/27890 Then I remembered my initial reaction of disbelief when I first heard of the rumor a few days before. I did some more digging and found the information was refuted by the Census.
My point in this rambling incoherent response is that we, as reporters, have pretty good instincts and we know what steps have to be taken to substantiate information or publish it as fact. Sometimes we just have to remind ourselves that it really doesn't matter where the content is being published, our responsibility to the public is the same.
Snopes.com is a good first stop when checking online posts. Not as fast as twitter but does debunk many urban myths posted online.
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