We live in the internet age, and as a consequence, we demand 24/7, instantaneous news coverage. But where speed is paramount, certain things are sacrificed. Sadly, the first to go are usually proofreading and fact-checking.
1. Typos in the crawl
Anyone who watches CNN, FoxNews, or MSNBC (okay, nobody really watches MSNBC) is well aware of the quick-hit sentence-long summaries of news stories that scrolls across the bottom of the screen. In the haste to get items posted onto the crawl, typographical errors are made. But would it kill the news networks to have someone watching the feed, looking for typos, and notifying the person with the computer if a mistake is made.
2. Broken links on websites
Nothing frustrates me more than clicking on a hyperlink on cnn.com or foxnews.com, thinking that I'm going to read about troop escalation in Iraq, only to be sent to a page discussing Britney Spears' sudden disdain for underwear. The news networks need to have someone whose full-time job is surfing the internet (I'll volunteer!), letting the computer jockeys know when they made mistakes so that they are corrected as soon as possible.
3. Misleading headlines
Misleading headlines for news articles are no new phenomenon. Newspapers with a certain political bias (fringe publications, of course, since no mainstream broadsheet would ever do something like that) choose their words carefully when writing headlines, knowing that many people get their news straight from the headline without reading the article. In the modern age, while these misdirections may still be a result of bias, I also believe they are largely the product of deadline-pressured editors failing to read the actual article.
4. Incorrect facts
I understand that when you need to get your news story out within minutes, thorough fact-checking might not be possible. You need to go with what you have. But certain fact-checking can be accomplished in the matter of seconds. For example, during the August airline security scare, various news outlets reported either that all food was banned from passing through security checkpoints, or that passengers would be forced to taste the food that they sought to brought through. A quick visit to the TSA website and a read-through of their press release would have disproved both allegations.
5. No accountability for mistakes
When you print a newspaper, your article has been memorialized in print for all time. If you make an error, you print a correction the next day. When you run a news website, you can keep revising your articles and uploading the most recent version to the site. Unless someone's computer has happened to cache the previous version, it is lost to society for all time. If you make a mistake, there is no need to admit it. You can just sweep it under the rug by correcting the facts in the new article and denying that the old article ever existed.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
#2: the news networks already have full-time people letting them know about broken links: the readers who email in to complain. Distributed computing at its simplest.
#5: You should check out The Wayback Machine: http://www.archive.org/
(The only problem is that, like Google, they're pretty lax about letting websites opt out)
While user-submitted correction of errors may work fine for a grassroots compendium like wikipedia, it seems disingenuous to me when professional media outlets abdicate their editing responsibilities to the consumers (who, incidentally, work for free).
I understand your objection, but one of the central tenets of Web 2.0 is that the old unidirectional model of Media (producer-creates, reader-consumes) is antiquated. Such advocates would question whether the newspapers are abdicating their editing responsibilities, or whether citizens are seizing their right to become something more than passive consumers.
Not that I think newspapers should be careless about broken links, but I wonder whether that particular cost is exaggerated, and whether hiring a full-time link-correcter (such as Shyster Ben) would be socially wasteful.
Post a Comment