I have more than once questioned the validity of sources people site online and even found a few egregious cases of people having no clue what they were reading (my favorite of all time was person who linked to a site to prove his point that turned out to be a computer science teacher's homework assignment for students to evaluate the reliability of the information on that page. If he had dug deeper, he would have found the teacher's answer key saying what a load of BS that page was.)
The most recent little piece of viral misinformation that spread (which has no political context I can tell) is Irish student Shane Fitzgerald placing a fake quote on French composer Maurice Jarre's Wikipedia page shortly after Jarre's death. It was a juicy little quote that, as you can expect, got picked up by newspapers and bloggers around the world and added to his obituary. Wikipedia editors caught it and deleted it fairly quickly. After a month of no one catching it, Fitzgerald revealed the hoax. So far, only one newspaper, the Guardian, has 'fessed up.
I know there are people almost gleeful at the prospect of the demise of newspapers. As newspapers decline, cut their reporting staff and more people rely on the internet and wire services, this will happen more often. Investigative reporting is an endangered art. If we lose the power of investigative reporting, we are going to descend into a Golden Age of political corruption as no one is there to dig it up and find it.
Think about it...how many bloggers really do original reporiting and break news stories? Heck, I would love to travel to Goddard and KSC and Houston to report on the current shuttle mission if someone would pay me to do it! The best I can do is watch mission briefings on NASA TV and red the press releases and try to put them in context. Most bloggers are in the same boat.
The Racine News and Racine Post are giving it a go but have a ways to go to become the real public watchdog that is needed. And they are just in one community and, if they succeed, would need to be duplicated hundreds of times around the country. We cannot let our current media watchdogs die before others are ready to take their place. Unwatched politicians are the most dangerous politicicans.
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4 comments:
Do you suggest subscribing to the Journal Times in order to support it even if you don't otherwise read the hard copy?
Well, I don't know what the long term answer is, Orbs. So many people seem to be denying the importance of the type of news gathering papers can do I am afraid we may be in for a rude awakening when they are gone if e don't start building a new media with serious reporting capabilities.
Peoples quest for reliable knowledge will prevail. I don't believe we really have too much to worry about. Just like the music industry needs to adapt to changing technology, so does the dinosaur news print and media. Besides, all that paper generated is not good for the environment.
One online paper I find interesting is jsonline, they come up with some very interesting articles.
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