Okay, I'm not in the news business, and I'm not going to tell anyone how to do their job. However, it'd be good to have news reporting that I could trust again, and there's evidence that fact-checking is an idea whose time has come.
Restoring trust to the news business via fact checking, etc., might be an idea whose time has come. It won't be easy, but we need to try.
Fact checking is difficult, time consuming, and expensive, and it's difficult to make that work in current newsrooms. There are Wall Street required profit margins, and the intensity of the 24×7 news cycle. The lack of fact checking becomes obvious even to guys like me who aren't real smart.
It's worse when, say, a cable news reporter interviews a public figure, and that figure openly lies, and the reporter is visibly conflicted but can't challenge the public figure. That's what Jon Stewart calls the "CNN leaves it there" problem, which may have become the norm. When such interviews are run again and quoted, that reinforces the lie, and that's real bad for the country.
Turns out that the NY Times just asked "Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?" That's a much more pointed version of the question I've previously posed. The comments are overwhelming, like "isn't that what journalists do?" and the more succinct "duh."
For sure there are news professionals trying to address the problem, like the folks at Politifact and Factcheck.org. We also see great potential at American Public Media Public Insight Network; with training in fact-checking, their engaged specialist citizens might become a very effective citizen fact-checking network. (This list is far from complete.)
My guess is that we'll be seeing networks of networks of fact checkers come into being. They'll provide easily available results using multiple tools like the Truth Goggles effort coming from MIT, or maybe simple search tools that can be used in TV interviews in real time.
Seems like a number of people in journalism have similar views, here's Craig Silverman from Poynter reporting recent conferences.
Silverman and Ethan Zuckerman had a really interesting discussion regarding the consequences of deception:
That brings me to the final interesting discussion point: the idea of consequences. Can fact checking be a deterrent to, or punishment for, lying to the public?
"I'm surprised we're not talking about how fact checking could reduce misinformation in the long term by creating consequences, creating punishment," said Harvard's Ethan Zuckerman at the DC event.
I'm an optimist, and hope that an apparent surge of interest in fact checking is real. Folks, including myself, have been pushing the return of fact checking for some months now. Recently, it's become a more prominent issue in the election.
Again, this is really difficult, but necessary. I feel that the news outlets making a strong effort to fact-check will be acting in good faith and trustworthy, and profitable.
However, this seems like a good way to start restoring trust to the news business.
Follow Craig Newmark on Twitter: www.twitter.com/craignewmark
Best have the default setting selected then. Make it known that an independent organisation exists, that can be hired to check contentious information. Challenging articles appearing without that “CHECKED BY” by line appended, should then be considered open to doubt.
"an apparent surge of interest in fact checking is real. Folks"
are finally finding out. That the mirror though which they are “seeing” a reflection of what they presume to be reality. Is in fact a mirage. That some manipulative media magnet, may first have his minions breathe a mesmerizing miasma over.
You are being naive. These "journalists" are merely corporate employees who know where their bread is buttered. There is no incentive, in fact there is a disincentive, to fact check if you want to keep your job.
However, the news is like eating your vegetables. It's nourishing, but boring. Maybe that's the thing about being trustworthy? Being trustworthy shouldn't be about getting ratings, and making a profit. It's about INFORMING people on a regular basis without hyperbole, and when there really is a story to report that should outrage people and get their ire up towards government officials and corporate bigwigs, THEN continue to follow that story to it's conclusion.
Follow-through, and complete reporting is how you build trust.
How can anybody trust today's local news when the first story is almost always an "if it bleeds it leads" kind of story? How can anybody trust any other news when the story is almost always a sex scandal, or which fevered-ego celebrity is poking another fevered-ego celebrity?
News editors have forgotten how to perceive what is important. Their budgets are under the entertainment division now and not the news.
Chew on this:
Fact-checking is all very well and good, so long as the story being checked is newsworthy. If it's not really news, then who cares?
I've been thinking about this network of fact-checkers for a long time in a general way. I'm in no position to do anything about it, but have been thinking nonetheless.
However, fact-checking doesn't go far enough.
Thorough investigative reporting needs to be a priority. When I was growing up, we had Woodward & Bernstein, and 60 minutes and the like. And they took on big stories, and these people and organizations were developed trust in what they did.
Today's journalists don't seem to be cut from the same cloth.
They don't investigate. They seem to be not much more than stenographers, hoping that their readers/viewers will somehow put the puzzle pieces together.
TV & newspapers are dead. When will news bureaus clue-in that if they want an audience, here it is.
As much as I respect the newer work of Woodward, and people like Dan Rather, the problem is that they are the old guard, and haven't made it to the internet. Look at the article here on huffpo recently by Dan Rather. He is fascinated by FB and Twitter, and has taken to blogging. Well that's great! He's discovered the time-sucking vortex that is social media. But it doesn't make investigative journalism any more reachable by the masses. It's just more puffery. And who the hell watches HDNet anyway? More and more people are ditching cable and satellite because those services have been charging too much money, and you still have to see commercials.
That being said, any individual organization that presents both side of an issue as equal without pointing out that one side is wrong or lying AS THEIR INVESTIGATION HAS DETERMINED TO BE THE CASE, then that organization should lose their press credentials and be classified merely as a stenography service.
Sorry, couldn't help myself.
Cheers!
Either David Gregory is not prepared or he is a push-over... either way, it makes that program a complete waste of time. John McCain is on almost every Sunday and he lies and lies.. after awhile I just turn the channel.