The chief argument against bloggers and the like heard in the increasingly dark hallways of professional media companies these days is that the work of citizen journalists is inherently susceptible to inaccuracies. Operating without editors or fact checkers, bloggers and citizen journalists alike can proclaim truth as they like. Their followers will then be led down paths of logic built on inaccurate, or at worse deliberately incorrect, fact.
But web-skeptics take notice. Various Internet based information tools are now starting to show up their harshest critics on the issue of fact checking.
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Shane Fitzgerald, a Dublin-based university student recently–and deliberately–posted inaccurate information on a Wikipedia site. When Maurice Jarre, a French composer, passed away, Shane rushed to his Wikipedia site to post a fake quote.
A number of paid, professional journalists who didn’t know much about Jarre but were paid to write about his death also turned to Wikipedia, and in turn printed the fake quote Fitzgerald wrote, verbatim, from the Wikipedia entry. The list of offenders includes a number of new sites, including Britain’s famed Guardian newspaper.
Meanwhile, Wikipedia’s editors caught this error and took it down. Fitzgerald posted it up a second time, and Wikipedia took it down again.
Despite the back-and-forth on Wikipedia about the quote, a whole month went by and the professional media still didn’t have a clue they had been had. Tired of playing this game, Fitzgerald finally ended up notifying the professionals himself of their mistake.
Journalists 0
Yes, many blogs and web-based information sources are filled with inaccuracies. But, alas, so is traditional media. This example shows that the web is finding robust ways to make up for its difficulties, and may eventually surpass traditional media’s accuracy level.
In this day and age, nobody has a monopoly on the truth.
