In the past few weeks, all of us have been faced with moral decisions of what to believe and what to not believe. And you may be thinking I am zeroing in on the Donald. But I am not writing just about him. What we are all faced with is a dilemma for all journalism in this age of viral media the likes of Twitter, Google, Tumblr, FriendFeed, Posterous, Identi, Plurk, BrightKite, FourSquare, Presently, Yammer, Ping, HuffPost, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and others. In all these sites you can get glimpses of fact, opinion dressed up as fact, fact dressed up as outrageous opinion (to boost circulation) and just plain “feelings” (as in “this is how I see it”).
For hundreds of years, journalism has relied on three legs to give you the reliable information you need to make decisions about your life. Like a three-legged stool, solid journalism is always stable when all three legs are checked and verified before putting it out as reliable fact to the public. That’s what you, the consumer, pay for. Leg one? Fact gathering (including witnesses and sources). Leg two? At least two independent sources of verification. Leg three? Editorial overview to ensure the gathered facts are either not a red-herring planted for some other purpose or that the facts serve the public purpose of the newspaper, radio or television (remember “All the news that is FIT to print”).
In this viral media world, when anyone can post anything, the urgency to get ahead of the competition can cause corners to be cut drastically, and two of those legs quickly become woefully missing. Here’s a warning: Everything you read on the internet is likely to be completely wrong. Maybe not immediately apparent… wait for it, it will become so shortly.
Let’s take the Gawker “exposé” of PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s backing of the Hulk Hogan legal case against Gawker. This is a perfect example of the viral media world crying “foul” because Hulk Hogan had a financial backer who had an axe to grind against the so-called journalists at Gawker.
Every TV and radio news station has referred to Gawker as a news outlet, giving them the mantle of real journalism. But are they really? The head of Gawker, Nick Denton, took a high moral tone on NPR on Thursday last week, claiming to be only a “small” millionaire, disadvantaged by Thiel’s bigger money. He went on to explain, pridefully, how Gawker has served the public interest (journalism’s claim to morality) by repeatedly unveiling matters of intense public interest, like when he felt it was “unconscionable” that Anderson Cooper’s sexual orientation should not be more widely known and that’s why “we outed him,” the same way they outed Thiel (and the connection is that Thiel is angry and paid to Hogan’s lawyers to get back at Gawker).
Really? Outing someone’s private sexual nature is in the public interest? Could it be of prurient interest to some, especially those who are bigots and therefore find such information titillating? Sure, the world is full of gossip mongers and devotees. But no one previously would consider such rubbish or such bigotry journalism at all. And the people who claim they are doing so in the public interest should be called out for it, the same way the Philadelphia Enquirer and several tabloid papers have been called out in the (long) past.
Ah, but the past is no more. This is a whole new, not-so-brave world where even serious journalists like David Folkenflik of NPR dare not ask questions, dare not challenge the likes of Gawker outing peoples’ private sexual desires. And how many of us have watched the Donald make bigoted, outrageous comments in one-on-one interviews and refuse to respond to follow-up questions or simply repeat the same bold-face nonsense again and again … no, wait, that’s the Twitter world, retweet something a million times and it does become the new reality. Most of the public thinks that anything repeated loudly and often enough must either make it true or contain the grains of truth. No, that’s not how real journalism works, or should I say worked. Most of what you are hearing these days is rumor, gossip, bigotry dressed up as fact — and where does the media get many of its “reliable sources?” As the CBS morning news team admits repeatedly every week, they read it on Gawker, Twitter, Google, Facebook and so on. Unfortunately the list of new journalism sources is endless, with an endless supply of nonqualified journalists. And their regurgitation of this nonsense increasingly undermines your ability to have any news source to rely on to help plan your life.
That’s what journalism is for, not entertainment, but the sharing of facts so you can plan your life. If life is now only to be built on rumor, gossip and nonsense, then you can kiss your future goodbye.
Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now lives in New Mexico.
