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