News on the Internet…
Final Assignment
News on the internet: are we losing the truth?
December 13, 2010
Abstract
As information technology expands and reaches an exponentially increasing audience, the people of the world are erroneously influenced by the amateur journalism afforded by the internet. Prensky (2001) highlights that today’s students will digest and process information in a fundamentally different way with less exposure to ‘legacy’ content and substantially more ‘future’ content that is digital. With this huge influx of technological information and the trend of citizen journalism we need to be sure that we can differentiate between fact and fiction. There exists a dangerous potential to devalue authentic journalistic efforts due to a lack of training in objectivity for the average citizen, and this can lead to falsification and/or misrepresentation of the facts. This paper will look at the threats and opportunities that exist with the rise of our online read-write culture, with a particular emphasis on blogs.
“The press is our chief ideological weapon.”
Anonymous authorship on the internet
According to Andrew Keen (2007), the internet is a vehicle of mis-communication. The ability for anyone and everyone to become an autonomous news blogger fuels the rise of citizen journalism but also risks a danger of amateur displacing professional journalist. Is an increase in egalitarianism worth the risk of a progressive exposure to unfiltered authored news by amateurs? Certainly, the boundary between who counts as “the press” has blurred with access to new technologies, challenging legal interpretation and educational practice. For example, “the press” was recently defined by the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. National Post (2010) as an “ill-defined group of writers and speakers,” but not all are granted privileges of “the press”. Hence, questions of journalism ethics must prevail: Where is quality control and fact checking? How do we know the information we are exposed to is true? What is the need for professional journalism and news reporting? Can the efforts of professionals and amateurs be combined to provide the public with the benefits of both experience and fresh eyes? In order to answer these questions we must first look at the history of online information sources, how they differ from traditional news sources and then we can identify the benefits and barriers that are generated as a result.
“The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves-and the better the teacher, the better the student body.”
Blogs- the good, the bad, the ugly
Blogs have been around on the internet for a number of years and they continue to grow in popularity. The original blogger was actually the inventor of the www, Tim Burners Lee, in 1991 and the term blog stemmed from web logging.
Stone (2002) defines a blog as an automated method of independent publishing that is available to anyone who has access to the internet. While some fear the worst, with blogs becoming the demise of all humanity, most see the advent of blogging as a forward movement for literacy and equal opportunity for everyone to be both a consumer and a producer of information.
When the original WYSIWYG web editor was created there was an explosion of homepages because virtually anyone could experiment with HTML. In 1999, Pyra Labs created ‘Blogger’ and in the same year Bridget Eaton defined a blog as ‘a website with dated entries’. She also created a comprehensive list of bloggers on the Eaton WebPortal which fueled the culture of linking online (Stone, 2002). Blogs gained popularity primarily because these initial bloggers tended to be very good at blogging and with their level of expertise they were able to cultivate a following. Now we can find blogs on virtually everything, which unfortunately includes the random thoughts of non-experts. Although there are some serious media- filtered blogs it becomes increasingly difficult to find trustworthy blogs to follow. People can follow the news blogs of the big newspapers and media companies (ie. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog , http://www.foxnews.com/blogs/ ) or they can enlist to the citizen journalism blogs that exist where the average Joe can contribute to the news (ie. http://www.newsmeback.com/blog/ , http://international.ohmynews.com/ , http://www.greenwich.co.uk/about/ ). This is where the difficulty begins. Do citizen journalists have qualifications that make them trustworthy? Do they have the stamina to keep up with reporting the news? Can they be objective? Although there have been some initiatives like the New Jersey Hyperlocal News Association who created a program to educate citizen journalists and bloggers so they could better inform the public, these efforts are few and far between.
Leman describes citizen journalists as “inspired amateurs who find out what’s going on in the places where they live and work, and who bring us a fuller, richer picture of the world than we get from familiar news organizations, while sparing us the pomposity and preening that journalists often display” (“Amateur Hour”, 2006). Our world is becoming flatter and flatter and therefore we want to know more about what is happening in our world. The Oh My News manifesto stemmed from concern that the traditional methods of news reporting were not appropriate enough or grassroots enough for our modern, global society. They believe that news is in fact a form of collective thinking. So how does internet journalism standardize its practice?
Stone states that “Blogs feed off the web, digest it, recycle it, and infuse it with new life. Created by feisty, intelligent, opinionated, subversive people—and sometimes small groups—blogs are the future of personal publishing” (Stone, 2002, p.7), so what is the danger in citizen journalism via blogs? The simple answer is that there are so many. There are a variety of sites that enable the public to create their own blog including: Blogger, Blog Spot, BloggerPro, Movebale Type, Diaryland, GrokSoup, Userland Software, Greymatter, Xanga and LiveJournal and this has lead to an significant increase in available news blogs.
The advent of blogs enables the ordinary people of the world to report the news as they see it. This can be problematic because there is no way of discerning if this is from an unbiased perspective. There is an expectation that professional journalists check their facts and can be held accountable if they deliberately report non-truths. Where is the accountability for the citizen journalists?
“Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”
Thomas Jefferson
Difference between web and print
The internet now provides decentralized access to unedited information, whereas historically people have retrieved information from accredited newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias and journals. The advent of blogs, wikis and social networks has provided people with the ability to create a networked, online, read-write culture. In addition to that, many newspapers are online now as well. In 1999, Sven Birkerts, warned us that “we are living in a state of intellectual emergency–an emergency caused by our willingness to embrace new technologies at the expense of the printed word.” He even suggested that the interconnectedness afforded by the internet will eventuate in us all losing our humanity and that using the internet is much like each of us wearing a full-bodied prophylactic that numbs our sensitivities. His point is that there is an inherent difference between electronic information and the printed word. There is a sense of being lost in the sorcery of the circuit when dealing with digital information. The medium of our communication is important and there is something wonderfully real about f2f language transmissions and the materiality of reading a paper text. Though newspaper readership is reportedly in a continuous decline and investigative journalism is under constant cutbacks, people will always have a cultural and cognitive relationship with tangible reading materials like newspapers and books. They are predictable and reliable.
Benefits- hidden and not so hidden
The most obvious benefit of anonymous authorship on the internet and citizen journalism can also be a criticism: the fact that anyone can publish text, images, muti-media on the internet without acquiring nifty nerd know-how (McIntosh, 2003). Anyone who has the inclination to report events or comment/critique political decisions can. Freedom of speech and expression exist in the blogosphere- but this can also enable hate groups to spread their word too. There is more opportunity to read about the same stories from different perspectives and people can challenge freely. The conglomerate media companies have little control over what people blog about so there is less concern around censorship and editing for financial gain of big business. Online, digital news is anytime news. News as it happens virtually eliminates waiting for the printed word. Perhaps the greatest advantage of the very social nature of blogging is that it affords knowledge building capacity through the organic formation of Communities of Practice.
“The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.”
~Bill Gates
Issues- barriers and challenges:
The greatest issue surrounding internet news and citizen journalism is the fear that the news the public receives is fuelled by rumour and innuendo. This can be minimized by selecting sites that are associated/affiliated with reputable news companies or long-time running blogs with proven histories of portraying the facts objectively. The problem that the average citizen has is acquiring the skill of finding the needle in the haystack. With so many websites reporting the news ‘as news’, learning to select the safe, truthful and relevant ones is a challenge. Then there is the issue of people responding to posts with opinions masked as facts (and so the rumours begin). On top of all of this the reliability of bloggers to maintain their news reporting stamina can remain a daily concern. Sensationalism remains a concern as well since we live in an age of skepticism and cynicism those who report the news are forever faced with the challenge of enticing readers. The issue of authorship and intellectual property and (in some countries like China) censorship, are real concerns for the daily blogger.
Case Studies
The professional journalists are being called out by bloggers. They are being forced to explain themselves and to prove that are still the watchdogs they are meant to be and not corrupt like the politicians and big business issues that they cover. Let’s not forget that it was bloggers that drew attention to the war records of John Kerry and George Bush in their political arenas. Bloggers have even been responsible for the resignation of senior news executives (“Journalism’s Backseat Drivers”, 2005). Is this a good thing? Blogs also had a significant role in the last American presidential campaign, for both sides, and have unfortunately continued to catalyze the spread of lies about Barak Obama being a muslim, non-American citizen who is a narcissistic socialist (Right Wing Watch, 2010). Journalists get it wrong sometimes but bloggers do too, whether they are cheerleading partisans or self-professed pundits. Here are some examples:
1. According to the American Journal Review some conservative bloggers insisted that the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for a close range photograph taken of Iraqi election workers being killed by insurgents must have been in communication with the terrorists since he/she was so close (“Journalism’s Backseat Drivers”, 2005).
2. In South Dakota after the 2004 election, the public learned that two bloggers Jason van Beek and Jon Lauck received $35,000 from the Republican John Thune and this was due to their attacking of the competition on their blog site. Their posts were reposted on influential blogs like Power Line and the Drudge Report (“Journalism’s Backseat Drivers”, 2005) .
3. According to an article entitled “Blogs Monger Rumors; All Hail Our Mainstream Media Saviors!” from the New York Times in 2009, the blogosphere is often fuelled by single source (or no source) rumours. The article refers to an incident in which the site Gawker suggested that Apple was going to buy Twitter and indicated that negotiations were almost complete. A few hours later TechCrunch, which is an influential tech news site, was posting the same information and by that evening more than 22000 views had occurred. The information was completely false.
4. Some bloggers have even been forced to apologize for their mistakes. Ron Schott, a Seattle blogger, had said that the 9/11 truth activists were insulting the victims of the tragic event when many of the victims are actually leaders of the movement. (Prison Planet, 2007).
Where to from here? Looking back and moving forward.
While proponents of educational technology and freedom of speech supporters will argue the merits of these internet affordances (social networks, web 2.0 applications and opensource), there is an inherent danger lurking within the words we hear in Youtube videos and those that we read within blogs and wikis: a recurrent lack of truth, inaccurate reports and invalidated statements.
We must remember that many people begin to blog for fun or to improve their craft. When more people in society are participating in daily communication about current events it is not only awakening the public consciousness, it can improve literacy. Since there are plenty of reputable international and local newspapers online we should use them supplemented with quality citizen journalism. We can also:
- Use a reliable fact checking website (http://factcheck.org/about/, www.mediamatters.org, www.politifact.com, www.snopes.com) to validate what you read
- Double check news that seems particularly astonishing
- Use reputable websites, wikis and blogs to obtain information
- Read the newspaper too!
- Contact the author or play devil’s advocate- challenge anonymity
- Use metadata to target the information you are after
- Start and maintain your own blog with rigorous fact checking and current eventsJ
Moreover, with the vast, interconnected, knowledge building capacity of the world wide web, we are advantaged with a plethora of information, including news sources. Are we losing the truth on the internet? Ultimately, no. However it is becoming increasingly obvious that the news is harder to find- even if there is more of it. As consumers of information, like any other product, we have an inherent responsibility to be proactive, to encourage competition and to check our facts to ensure that the latest breaking story is truth and not rumour.
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