NET RESULTS:WHEN FACTS are not facts in a news story, how do you offer a correction that can compete with the internet's viral news-spreading abilities once the story is out and the subject of discussion?, asks KARLIN LILLINGTON
The answer is: you can’t. Once a publication posts a story, if information contained within it proves of such interest that it gets posted to and commented about on blogs, tweeted and retweeted over Twitter, forwarded via e-mail, picked up by other news agencies and reprinted and rebroadcast, and then lives on in its many incorrect versions on search engines and their archived pages, the “truth” is what gets repeated often enough.
This newspaper learned that difficult lesson last week when the Peoplemagazine website came up with an incorrect note as part of its broader Tiger Woods coverage, stating that The Irish Timeshad been sued by Woods for publishing fake nude pictures of his wife.
Many people will remember the incident involved and, at the time, the story got wide coverage abroad as well. But it wasn't The Irish Times, it was Dublinermagazine that published the fake images. For The Irish Times, the Peoplemistake was an embarrassing, albeit fairly minor, error. But still, the fact that CNN picked up the story and featured it on its website, which then caused it to be picked up across the globe in short order, was discomfiting.
A verbal apology was extended by CNN but I gather that The Irish Timesis looking for a published correction and apology on the Peopleand CNN websites.
I know the senior editor at Peoplewhose job it was to look into how the incorrect attribution happened. He is highly experienced and professional, coming from a print magazine background and an environment where monumental feats of fact-checking are the norm before an issue hits the newstands. So I can only imagine how mortifying the situation has been for him.
But I also know of the extraordinary pressure on website editors and writers to get stories posted at a far higher volume, faster, and with fewer staff than traditional print news sources. A senior editor on a US weekly magazine might work on four or five stories a day, and such stories generally go through a rigorous fact-checking process.
About a decade ago, I began to do some writing for US business and technology magazines, and the fact-checking is unlike anything I have seen anywhere else (ironically so, in some ways, as libel laws are far more protective of the press than on this side of the Atlantic).
It is the norm for a subeditor to return to a writer and ask for an original source verification for any fact presented in a piece that could not be independently confirmed. This could reach trivial levels – I was once asked to prove my assertion that a minister liked colourful suits, and that a department secretary enjoyed hillwalking, for a US magazine.
If these, or any far more serious facts in an article, were found to be wrong after they were printed, the damage control was pretty easy. A correction could be printed, apologies issued, and the readership was limited in any case. Even if the article was posted to the magazine’s website, this was before the arrival of blogs, Twitter and other online vehicles for instantly spreading information (or non-information).
As it was the print magazine’s content that was going to the web – after the long fact-checking process – it was less likely that a glaring, embarrassing or defamatory error would have appeared in the first place.
Of course print journalists make mistakes that the fact-checkers miss – sometimes they are appalling errors. But it seems to me we are entering an era of news that is often speculative, unverified, uncertain, and sometimes deliberately misleading.
As mainstream “old media” declines in its current incarnations, even the “mainstream” news websites, with trained writers and editors, are far more at risk of letting errors slip through. Anyone working for such websites deals with heavier workloads, tighter deadlines and volume, volume, volume, often at low pay.
Uncertain business models and the expectation of “free” online content results in an inability to provide news the way it has been done in the past, with the editorial time and teams to get the stories right.
The sheer volume of online noise and commentary also make for a hard-to-navigate river of news babble. Who to trust?
Overall, I agree with US columnist Ellen Goodman’s assertion last week that online media – for which, incidentally, I am a passionate advocate – enables an explosion in “truthiness”, the reliance on gut feeling being “the truth” rather than actual fact. “There is a sense that we don’t need science or editing or fact-checking, as long as we have crowd-sourcing. We don’t have to build opinions on facts; we can build facts on opinions,” she wrote.
We can also ricochet that truthiness, as well as any factual errors, through the internet at breakneck speed, where it is picked up as truth, dwells for the foreseeable future in internet archives and becomes “fact”.
These are issues we have barely begun to take in as we drink from an endless, gushing pipe of news, facts, factoids and truthiness. Which is which? If we no longer wish to pay for the writers and editors who did the fact-checking, will a new model emerge for ensuring what’s reliable? If not, finding the facts is going to be ever more difficult.
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Twitter: twitter.com/klillington
