Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Breaking (or Broken?) News Cycle

A few weeks ago, photos of a lost Amazon tribe were splashed all over the Internet. For the better part of a day, Yahoo! ran this anthropological discovery as the lead story in its featured news box on the homepage. The photographs, taken from a helicopter, were released as evidence in the case against logging on the Brazilian-Peruvian border.

But today, Yahoo! has been forced into a mea culpa retraction. Turns out the photos are of a tribe that's been "discovered" since 1910, and the photos were released as a political statement against logging. The photographer came clean on his real motivations in Sunday's edition of The Guardian.

Since the Internet has set the pace of the news cycle to warp speed, one wonders how much of the time the information is half true, mostly true or - worst of all - not true at all. In this case, the tribe was documented (if never photographed), but knee-jerk journalism sent the photos out on the wire before there was even time to confirm their veracity. The race to be first isn't always winning the slow-and-steady path to accuracy.

Maybe it's time to concede that Mama was right - you can't believe everything you hear. Or maybe it's just that you have to take one source with a grain of salt. With blogs - like The Inbox - taking to reporting at the grassroots level, perhaps the news cycle is just starting with the major news sources and is making its arc through the online forums. All the same, it's hard to find anywhere these days that give you just the facts. That's what sparked the Obama campaign to create its own "fact checker."

The bottom line is, whether it's the Amazon or the American President, it's sometimes advisable to be your own fact checker and make sure that seeing is believing.

4 comments:

Adrian Pritchett said...

Only recently was there a story about how a teenager sent a false press release that resulted in a story relaying its contents appearing on Google News.

Ashley said...

I think Entertainment Tonight is still holding a retraction on the Angelina-Jolie-gave-birth story even though her camp has come out repeatedly to say that the twins have yet to arrive.

And now, there's the Time magazine story about the "pregnancy pact" in Gloucester, Mass.

It's almost like news is getting reported by the method of that old game, Telephone, where people whisper a statement ear-to-ear until it's far afield from its original content.

Brian said...

Yes, I think years from now we will look back and the biggest consequence of social media/changes in traditional media will be the erosion of trust in what people read -- this is accelerating as google and yahoo get in the "news" business and AP and others try to compete. You already see it in talk radio in other areas. The idea that Sean Hannity provides the best "presidential election coverage" as his radio show claims is preposterous as he is a mouthpiece for one party -- yet some people actually believe it.

Gus said...

History has shown that media-aided hoaxes like this one happen time and time again (cold fusion, the Hitler diaries, art forgeries, etc.) The speed with which these hoaxes are now discovered has greatly accelerated, but I feel that's about the only major change.

Still, this development doesn't help the media one bit.