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Hoaxes leave media struggling to separate fact from fiction
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Business English: Hoaxes leave media struggling to separate fact from fiction
Is there a movement within the media world from producing a correct story to being the first to publish a story?A spate of media hoaxes that have entertained viewers and lit up the blogosphere have prompted a new round of handwringing over a news industry already worrying that it is losing the public's trust. Within two weeks, US news channels have cleared their schedules to track an oversized balloon flying across Colorado, in the mistaken belief that a six-year-old boy was trapped inside, and been taken in by a fake press conference purporting to announce a change in the US Chamber of Commerce's stance on climate legislation
In the UK, a celebrity-obsessed media's vulnerability to spoofs has been highlighted by a documentary, Starsuckers , which tracks the ease with which tabloid newspapers fell for fabricated snippets of celebrity gossip, such as the "news" that Amy Winehouse's hair-do had caught fire.
The stunts coincided with a lengthy Columbia Journalism School study which argued that a 33 per cent decline in US newsroom staffing since 1992 was threatening credible, independent reporting, and fed concerns in most developed news markets that fewer staff have eroded the media's ability to check facts.
"The general order was that you got a story, you checked your facts, and then you reported it," said Robert Thompson, professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University. "That has been reversed. We now watch live as reporters do what they used to do before we got the story."
Members of the Yes Men, the group that called reporters to the Washington Press Club masquerading as spokesmen for the US Chamber of Commerce, said their primary target had not been the media, but those who exploit its vulnerability for commercial or political gain.
"Our version of a hoax only points out that large corporate interests have a really easy time getting their hoaxes out all the time. They just do it in the form of press releases," said Mike Bonanno, a Yes Men co-founder.
"Unfortunately, because journalism has been so defunded and journalists have so little time a lot of basically false information is getting out there," he added, citing reporting of claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the US-led invasion.
Attempts to hoodwink the media are not new, points out Alan Mutter, a journalism lecturer, news industry blogger and former newspaper editor. "But in the old days, there was more latency, more time before going on air or publishing."
In addition, "the people in control of media were people with certain professional standards and certain levels of scepticism". Now, when stories are broken on Twitter or by bloggers, "the bias has moved from getting it right to getting it first".
The recent hoaxes highlight a phenomenon British journalist Nick Davies has dubbed "churnalism", in which spoon-fed press releases become news, and what the Pew Research Centre's Project for Excellence in Journalism has called a "media echo chamber", in which news outlets copy each other's ever-narrower agendas.
Shameful statistics
Airtime and column inches devoted to "balloon boy" - a nickname apparently coined by internet commentators rather than by a mass media outlet - squeezed out subjects ranging from US healthcare reform to the economy, Mr Mutter noted. According to the Pew Research Centre's weekly news index, the story of Falcon Heene and his publicity-hungry family's balloon occupied 16 per cent of cable news schedules in the week beginning Monday October 12, ranking as the week's third biggest story, above Afghanistan and Pakistan.
For Greg Dobbs, a former ABC News correspondent and author of Life in the Wrong Lane, one new development is media outlets' willingness to continue covering a story even after discovering they have been fooled. "The media was not only taken in, but chose to stay with the story once it found out it was a hoax," he said.
For some, however, the latest stunts at the media's expense are a sign that a profession fretting about its relevance has not lost its role in driving debate. "If you ask a hoaxer 'why are you going to mainstream media venues?' he will say that's where the attention is," said Prof Thompson. He added that media priorities were unlikely to change soon. "We sat transfixed and watched what turned out to be nothing more than an empty balloon. What could be more perfect as a metaphor?"
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The Financial Times, 17.11.2009
© 2009 The Financial Times,
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