Lessons from the CBS News failure
Another lesson is for journalists to pay attention to chatter on the Internet. Within hours of CBS making its charges — basically that Bush was a laggard in the National Guard — bloggers and other commentators on the Net expressed doubt over the veracity of documents that CBS used to back its story (and later posted on its Web site). Less than a day after the broadcast, the Cybercast News Service, a division of the Media Research Center in Arlington, Va., had picked up on the chatter and backed — with its own interviews with independent experts — the bloggers’ contention that the documents were phony. The rest of the mainstream media took note, and quickly followed. But CBS was slow to pay attention. Jay Rosen, chairman of New York University’s Department of Journalism, asks, “Why doesn’t CBS have someone reading the Internet?” —Marshall Loeb —Lessons from the CBS News failure (CBS Marketwatch )
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It will be interesting to see what history makes of this "news failure". From what I've read so far, it seems CBS is just the victim of a very good hoax. I find the reactions of CBS employees to be exactly what I expect from people who are victim of a hoax. Unfortunately, the media's focus on the victim of the hoax rather than the hoax itself, is also expected.
Ironically, the following interview appeared in New Scientist before the 60 Minutes show aired:
http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp?id=ns24631
I had saved the interview as a reference to discuss the mistakes people often make when they identify and defer to authority.
A little deconstructionism to start your day off...
This article is certainly more about the failure of CBS News than it is about the success of blogs. But clearly the archetypal story of weblogs is starting to change, at least as the mainstream media represent them. We see here that Big News has failed at all the things that is supposed to differentiate Big News from pajama-clad bloggers who live in their parents' basements.
Journalists, too, cite outside sources for their claims; one of the interesting details of the CBS news document SNAFU was that bloggers critiqued the credentials of the experts CBS News cited.
Why does all of this weirdness have me thinking of thesmokinggun.com? Heh.
Blogs are great for generating 'buzz' like they did in analysis of the CBS documents -- and clearly they're democratizing the Truth with a capital T. But they can be just as bad -- if not worse -- than CBS News at perpetuating lies and rumors, no? I've seen a lot of self-congratulatory back-patting in the blogosphere, but I'm not so sure it's earned. This is just the year of media buzz about blogs, from covering the Olympics and the presidential conventions to this CBS controversy. But bloggers rarely have the onus of proving what they say or documenting their evidence, as CBS News did. Often "evidence" is a deferral of responsiblitity to an outside source in the blogosphere, which could be an infinite chain of deferral.
Just thinking outloud over the morning coffee, enjoying reading your blog as always...