Responding to a suggestion from Buddy Stein, I am forwarding this
interesting discussion of what can happen when mainstream media use
blogs as authoritative information sources. It appeared only on IMA-L
and applies directly to members of this list. -- Peter Parisi
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Gorelick, Steve <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mar 24, 2007 5:11 PM
Subject: [IMA] When Mainstream Media Use Blogs as Sources Without Attribution
To: [log in to unmask]
When John Edwards and his wife announced the recurrence of her cancer,
I asked two of my classes to follow the subsequent coverage given that
we are reading Susan Sontag's seminal essays "Illness as Metaphor" and
AIDS and Its Metaphors." Sontag is concerned with the language and
metaphor we use to talk about illnesses like cancer, and with what our
linguistic choices reveal about deeply held attitudes. We also have
been examining how people actually dealing with cancer negotiate a
cultural environment and mass media saturated with vocabulary and
ideology implying that cancer is inevitably catastrophic.
As I sat in my office reading all the breaking news bulletins, it
became clear that someone had it wrong. Some mainstream networks were
reporting that Edwards was suspending his campaign, some said he was
ending it, and others said he was continuing. (Some of you may
remember that Edwards visited Hunter last year, met with a number of
our students, and held several seminars.)
What happened?
The explanation turns out to be more than a little embarrassing for
the newspapers and television networks that, by and large, have
expressed great skepticism about blogs as reliable news sources. For
the most part they have decried the lack of editing and the lack of
fact checking. You can trust The New York Times, they argue, but why
and how can you trust some kid in Topeka using Wordpress.
As you will see in the AP story below, a number of the biggies were
relying on a blog as their sole source when they went with the story
that Edwards was suspending his campaign.
I want to be careful not to draw too much from this. One story does
not prove anyone's argument about either the influence or the accuracy
of the blogosphere. In this case the blog was wrong, as were the
networks that took blog report at face value and reported it without
attribution. Sometimes the mainstream media and some of my favorite
newspapers blow it badly. What this does reveal, however, is that –
with all their dismissals of blogs – the "biggies" are willing to base
a fairly big story on the very blog-based sources that they have
complained cannot be monitored for accuracy.
Last August Columbia J-School Dean Nicholas Lemann wrote a fairly
condescending piece in the New Yorker called "Amateur Hour" that
cautioned about relying on blogs. While some of Lemann's concerns
about quality and editing and accuracy can't be easily dismissed (in
any medium), it now seems clear that – whatever the mainstream media
is publicly saying about blogs -- what they are doing with them is
reading them, using them, and basing stories on them. Given the AP
story below, it is at least fair to wonder how many other examples
there are of blog-reporting being used without attribution.
Web site apologizes for Edwards report
By David Bauder, AP Television Writer | March 22, 2007
NEW YORK --A reporter for the new Politico Web site apologized for
reporting that John Edwards was suspending his campaign for president
more than an hour before Edwards said Thursday he was staying in the
race.
The incorrect report rocketed through the media before Edwards held
his news conference announcing the recurrence of his wife's cancer.
Some outlets used Politico's information; others steered clear.
Ben Smith, a former New York Daily News reporter, posted the report on
his Politico Web log at 11:06 a.m. EDT. Quoting but not identifying
"an Edwards friend" as his source, Smith reported that Edwards was
suspending his campaign and may drop out completely because of
Elizabeth Edwards' cancer.
"There was never any discussion of suspending the campaign," Edwards
adviser Jennifer Palmieri said. She said the Edwardses invited about
half a dozen aides to their home to discuss how best to tell the
public about her diagnosis and their decision to stay in the race.
Smith, in a later post titled "Getting it Wrong," explained how he had
trusted a reliable source he had known for years. But he "unwisely"
wrote it without getting a second source, he said.
"When the campaign pushed back harder than I'd expected, I added that
information to the original item, but that doesn't undo the damage,"
Smith wrote. "My apologies to our readers for passing on bad
information."
The Politico, a Web site with a companion free tabloid distributed in
Washington, began in January with many respected political
journalists. It was founded by John Harris and Jim VandeHei, longtime
Washington Post journalists.
With news organizations waiting for a news conference that it had
known about for more than 12 hours without a substantive leak ahead of
time, Smith's report proved too hard for many to resist.
CNN cited the Politico report several times before Edwards' news
conference, but pulled back when correspondent Candy Crowley said
Edwards staffers were casting doubt on it.
While MSNBC did not cite the report on television, the Web site
MSNBC.com ran the information as a banner headline. MSNBC.com later
apologized, saying it had relied on Politico "and a source who spoke
to NBC."
CBS News, which has a partnership agreement with Politico, posted the
report on the CBS Web site without doing its own reporting, and later
corrected it, a spokeswoman said.
NBC News anchor Brian Williams delivered his own correction after the
network briefly interrupted regular programming for the Edwards news
conference.
"When we came on for this special report, we delivered two headlines
to you. Number one, that Mrs. Edwards' cancer had returned," he said.
"Sadly, that headline turned out to be correct. The second headline
was that John Edwards was ending or suspending his campaign for
president, and as we just heard from the former senator, he said this
campaign goes on. So that part of this story, at least for now, is
incorrect."
ABC News did not cite Politico, either on the air or Web, because its
own sources were leading the network in the other direction, said Jon
Banner, executive producer of "World News."
"The pressure is on to get these things right, especially when it
concerns someone's health," he said. "There's some sensitivity to
that."
Fox News Channel and The Associated Press also did not repeat the
Politico report, relying on their own reporters.
Harris, Smith's editor at Politico, was not immediately available for
comment. But he told Smith in an e-mail that his reporting was worth
sharing with readers, but only with the caution that the information
was fragmentary.
"We should not have made a flat, predictive assertion about what
Edwards was going to do," Harris wrote. "The lesson, which we both
know but re-learned, was the importance of precision."
The incident illustrates the danger faced by Politico, a Web site that
tries to combine the gossipy aspects of a Web log with the
authoritativeness of journalists, said Tom Rosenstiel, a former
political reporter and director of the Washington-based Project for
Excellence in Journalism.
"It doesn't have a lot of track record and it's still making first
impressions," Rosenstiel said. "This not a good first impression."
------
Associated Press reporters Jake Coyle in New York and Nedra Pickler in
Washington contributed to this report.
--
Peter Parisi, Ph.D.
Dept. of Film & Media Studies
Hunter College
695 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10021
212-772-4949
"The suffering itself is not so bad, it's the resentment against
suffering that is the real pain." --Allen Ginsberg
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