The Zing of Authenticity

The Zing of Authenticity

"Wait, I've got to let the Twitter know the senator is gay!"

Don't tweet this yet.  Don't post it on your news site.  Not until you check to see if I am who I claim to be.  Or that my news flash is really... Real.

Am I really a journalist or a conspiracist?  Do I know what I saw, or do I attribute events to unnamed sources who thought they overheard something?

Twitter has been praised for helping to break major stories, from the Trayvon Martin shooting, or the Boston bombing. It can be a powerful tool.

But along the way, the world of Twitter has led journalism through its own atrocities, or at least train wrecks. And Twitter's use by reputable news sites, professional reporters and opinion writers at times remains about as sophisticated as law enforcement during the days of Wyatt Earp and the shootout at the O.K. Corral. (Lanson, 2013)

Now more than ever, news organizations must have policies that establish the importance of being right, not just being first. A reporter's first responsibility is to be accurate, check things out before  passing things along. Establishing guidelines on when to tweet, how to tweet and how to check the validity of tweets.

For example, the ethics code of The Los Angeles Times sets this standard for its staff: "Our job is to tell readers what is true, not what might be."  Yet increasingly journalists are trafficking in the fast lane of rumor, throwing out "what might be" and then scrambling to see whether what they’ve published is true or false (LA Times, 2013).

Even the most upstanding news sites can't always ignore what's whirling around on the Internet.  NPR's new Ethics Handbook, unveiled in February, includes a special social media section. It warns reporters to "Conduct yourself online just as you would in any other public circumstances as an NPR journalist. ... Verify information before passing it on."

That seems like good advice. But then NPR seems to suggest it won't always happen:  "One key is to be transparent about what we're doing. We tell readers what has and hasn't been confirmed. We challenge those putting information out on social media to provide evidence. We raise doubts and ask questions when we have concerns ... And we always ask an important question: am I about to spread a thinly-sourced rumor or am I passing on valuable and credible (even if unverified) information in a transparent manner with appropriate caveats" (NPR, 2013).

I feel that all journalists should verify information rather than passing on rumors and saying it "may or may not be true." But in an age in which polls suggest that millions of Americans still believe our president is a Muslim born in Kenya, that our government brought down the World Trade Center, and we never landed on the moon. It appears that millions of us thrive on the shocking and sensationalized what could have happened. 

Hopefully journalists know that they need not contribute to the confusion.  It is one thing for a news organization to deconstruct a widely-spread rumor, to track down where and how it started, to dissect what aspects of it have been verified and what aspects are simply false. That is responsible journalism if, at times, a distraction from breaking news that really did happen.

It is quite another thing for news organizations to pass on rumors, without an effort to verify, without in some cases so much as a comment from the subject of the rumor.  That is the antithesis of good journalism and a practice that can only damage even more the already shaky credibility of the journalism profession.

On the Media host Brooke Gladstone asked Alex Goldman, a producer for the show about his tweeting throughout the night of April 19 during the manhunt for the Boston bombing suspects.  When much of the information that he re-tweeted turned out to be nothing but speculation, Gladstone pressed him on it during her show.

"You know I was really caught up in the sort of adrenalin of the moment tweeting all that stuff," Goldman said. "In the the cold light of day, today, I do feel a little embarrassment about it."

"So you did something that we criticize a lot of people for, which was report things before their corroborated by police officials" Gladstone asked. 

Goldman responded: "As much as I hate to admit this... there really is a thrill to being the first or being as close the first is possible to report a story.  I don't think that there’s anybody who reports news that doesn't fall prey to that, and there is a real immediacy and sort of a stimulus response to tweeting... its very seductive."

If news is defined as the facts of: Who, what, when, where, why, how, so what, and what’s next, 

I wonder if twitter news should even be called news.  A more appropriate title would be twitter speculation, or twitter life sensationalized.    

Reference

Gladstone, B. (2013) Twitter Coverage Through the Night. On the Media.                     

http://www.onthemedia.org/2013/apr/19/twitter-coverage-through-night/

Lanson, J. (2013) Let's Establish Ethics Codes for Using Twitter in Journalism, Media Ethics Magazine.   http://www.mediaethicsmagazine.com/index.php/browse-back-issues/143-spring-2012/3998417-lets-establish-ethics-codes-for-using-twitter-in-journalism

LA Times Ethics Code                                                                                                                                 http://latimes.image2.trb.com/lanews/media/acrobat/2005-07/18479691.pdf

NPR Ethics Handbook

http://ethics.npr.org/