Opinion: Lack of editorial oversight opens door for unfounded allegations that damage credibility, harm reputations and waste time.I am not a big fan of the "citizen journalism" being practiced on the Internet these days. One of the tenets of "real" journalism is that you don't distribute information that hasn't been checked. Citizen publishers are under no such obligation, so the information that winds up in blogs and distributed on mailing lists must always be considered suspect, even if sent with the best of intentions.
Why does this matter? Because false information, once distributed, can never really be called back. You can distribute a correction, but some number of people will never see it. To them, the original story will always be the truth. The nasty allegation will never be answered and questions will remain.
Responding to these questions and allegations takes someone's time and, frankly, most people have better things to do than respond to wacky Internet posts. And sometimes there can be so many posts that it's impossible to respond to them all. Or the question may never even get to a person capable of answering it. This is the information age's equivalent of justice delayed being justice denied.
The Internet holds quite an attraction for people who don't think things through and who offer their perhaps well-meaning but ill-informed speculation to the masses. These people should be checking their facts rather than putting out a question that should never have been asked in a public forum. Not that I have a problem with questions, people tell me I ask way too many of them. It's just that public questions can lead to erroneous conclusions.
I am writing because of an example I ran into a few days ago. In the great scheme of things, it's not a very big deal. It doesn't matter what mailing list this occurred on. It's the issue, not the individuals involved, that deserves discussion. I'll just say the list goes out to tens of thousands of readers and is mostly comprised of information sent to the list's moderator for redistribution.
Here's the post that concerned me. It regards National Public Radio.
"Subject: NPR Censors Katrina Report?
"A week or so ago, (this list) forwarded a personal memoir by two paramedics who were" treated badly by New Orleans authorities. (I am fuzzing this so as not to repeat a serious allegation I can't vouch for).
"While driving home yesterday, I chanced upon an interview with several Katrina survivors on our local NPR station during their regular Sunday afternoon feature. The second person interviewed was one of these paramedics, and just as she was getting into the really awful events she experienced, NPR cut the feed for that story, and
replaced it with one from several months ago regarding poverty in
Latin America. After about ten minutes of this new 'replacement', I
turned off my radio.
"An e-mail inquiry to my local NPR station has so far gone unanswered.
The post leaves the reader thinking that NPR may have censored a report it somehow considered too negative to broadcast (I suppose), and the station is covering up by not answering the poster's e-mail. I suppose this is possible, but it is highly unlikely.
This message went to a big list, with lots of influential people on it (some of whom seem a tad paranoid at times), so the posting got forwarded to NPR, whose "head of communications" responded that the network didn't censor anything and has itself broadcast critical reports and tough post-Katrina interviews.
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A more definitive answer came from the producers of the popular "This American Life" program which had, in fact, broadcast the interview in question on hundreds of stations and knew of no attempts to censor the broadcast. If a station had wanted to "censor" the program, it could have simply not carried it at all and replaced it with another week's episode. (NPR, by the way, does not distribute the program and has no say whatsoever in its content.)
Eventually, someone who understands broadcasting weighed in with the likely real answer: Many radio stations are run by computer, especially on weekends. Radio station computers, as I know from my own radio experience, sometimes screw up. Type a command wrong or hit a software glitch and a program can end right in the middle, just as seemed to have happened here.
This posting and what followed isn't the worst example of Internet nonsense I've come across. Everything here is totally innocent and well-intended.
In the old (pre-Internet) days, the poster might have called a newspaper to express his censorship concern. My bet is the newspaper would have checked the story out, probably learned about a computer screw-up at a public radio station, notified the NPR listener that their concern appeared unwarranted and that would be the end of things.
The newspaper would not have distributed such a story to tens of thousands of readers until it had something like an answer that supported the implied allegation of censorship. Why? Because many readers would accept the accusation as being "true" and never see the follow-up.
This question should never have been distributed to thousands of people without investigation or comment. But, once this nonsense was in the public domain it needed a response, which caused both the head of communications at NPR and a producer at "This American Life" to take the time to issue their organizations' response.
Over a period of days, this ill-informed question wasted a lot of people's time—some of whom will never figure out that NPR didn't censor anyone.
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I don't believe the moderator of the list did anyone a favor by passing the question to such a large audience. There should have been some investigative work done and, if warranted, the results shared widely. As a newspaper editor, that's what I would have done. Such a course would have saved many people's time, would have prevented a small chip in NPR's reputation, and would have improved the Internet's credibility.
What I have described isn't a really big deal. While I can't prove censorship didn't take place—it's always hard to completely rule out any possibility—it seems like what we have is a well-intended question that didn't need to be so widely asked.
The harm done wasn't major and wasn't intentional on anyone's part. Fair-minded people can argue that no damage was done at all. But, Internet publishers should realize that sending 10,000 copies of an e-mail isn't that much different than throwing a newspaper in front of as many homes.
Newspapers and mainstream publications certainly have no an exclusive on quality content and credibility, but Internet publishers could still learn a lot from them.
Contributing editor David Coursey has spent two decades writing about hardware, software and communications for business customers. He can be reached at david_coursey@ziffdavis.com.
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