Yesterday, I was listening to a discussion with Tom Brokaw broadcast on NPR from The Commonwealth Club. Asked his opinion of news and information in the digital age, the veteran journalist said that he believes the variety of available content is generally a benefit to the world but that the consumer must “apply filters” to the information being delivered. In other words, the onus is now on us to do the fact-checking we used to rely on relatively few news sources to do on our behalf; and Brokaw suggests the basic questions: “What is the source? Who are the players? What is the vested interest?”
We liberals are pretty clear about the manipulative puppet show that calls itself FOX News, but we are simultaneously less critical of information sources that at least appear to share our ideological views. In general, even if the source is the New York Times or Forbes, we should pay attention to the reality that the non-stop, digital news frenzy results in a lot of self-made journalists sourcing one another. On Salon.com, for example, Glenn Greenwald will use a word like documented that links to another article that itself provides no hard evidence for its position. This phenomenon is literally viral, and I believe the educated, progressive class needs to be more critical of every story before feeding the disease, no matter what logo appears in the header.
Recently, a well-educated, liberal friend of mine posted this piece from Reader Supported News, and it may well be one of the worst examples of insidious, hack journalism I’ve seen yet. If all you read is the article, you will assume that Senator Franken voted against the National Defense Authorization Act, which is not true and can actually be documented. The article, dated 12/17, is largely copied and pasted from a floor statement made by Franken prior to the vote (dated on the senator’s site 11/29); but Franken ultimately voted Yea for NDAA on 12/1, when the bill passed 93-7.
In addition to literally taking the senator’s words and post-dating them in order to obfuscate, somebody (we’ll never know who) wrote an introduction to the piece that begins “Yesterday, the Senate passed a bill…” thus creating the illusion that whatever date the news aggregator puts on this nonsense is, in fact, the day after a vote that is now almost a month old.
This same article, whatever its source, appears verbatim on Huffington Post and several other sites with less brand recognition. Huff Post shows over 6,000 “Likes,” and nearly 3,000 shares — all by well-meaning, likely-liberal citizens who have literally been lied to about this story and simply assumed that it was true.
Citizen journalism can be a powerful tool, but only if those of us still clinging to rational thought in this crazy world are willing to double check before sharing.
There is certainly a lot of flinging about of unsubstantiated information, especially during the current electoral frenzy (on both sides) and certainly during times of war (seemingly always a war someplace.) And it goes deeper than that, too, to the question of bias. What stories does the media choose to present and what stories does it ignore? How much of a reporter’s information comes directly from sound bites at a press conference instead of from investigative work? Which negative or positive words are used in what context and in relation to which “sides” of an issue?
Thanks for posting, Michelle. My point is that there is so much volume in the digital age that literally nothing can be taken at face value anymore other than, perhaps, hard news from certain sources. If the NY Times says, “Obama bought a pet elephant,” odds are it’s true because that’s verifiable; and the Times hasn’t degraded to the point where it’s likely to print false data in most cases. But the sheer tonnage of OpEd material posing as news is threatening rational discourse even among rational people. Greenwald, who I mention in the post, has solid credentials and makes very good points about NDAA, for example, but one must read him carefully and recognize that even he writes from premise that Obama and Congress have the intent to foster an Orwellian state of perpetual war. If that’s the bias, then there is no other way to interpret the language in the controversial bill. Thoughtful articles like Greenwald’s multiply and mutate into incendiary headlines written by “iReporters” and other amateurs whose words get passed around the web through social media.
David – The original article in question is not dated 11/17. It’s dated 12/17, two days after the final vote on the defense authorization act (http://is.gd/LttHIu). These are Franken’s own words, taken from his own personal blog space at The Huffington Post (http://is.gd/3gjppc), and aggregated/re-posted at various spots around the Internet, including the site you link to. The situation is even laid out on Franken’s own blog: http://is.gd/Xxxu0N. As I see it, he’s more than entitled to re-purpose his own floor speech — which, as it happens, occurred on 11/29 — when penning a blog item for The Huffington Post. This is not to say that there isn’t plenty of hack journalism on the Internet, but I suspect you’ve chosen a poor case to highlight as an example.
Thank you for responding, and you’re dead right about that date, which is purely a typo (now corrected) on my part. My point is the floor speech happened prior to the vote and was repurposed by somebody well after the vote to create the illusion that Franken voted against the bill, which is simply not true. He voted Yea on 12/1. Because he voted in favor of the bill, I seriously doubt it was the senator who repurposed his own speech to make it look otherwise.