Fact Check -- The Internet Market Will Weed Out the News Pretenders

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Professor George Harmon teaches a broad array of topics at Medill, from editing and reporting to business communications strategy and tactics. The Intersection asked Harmon about the changing way that many people are getting "the news."

Intersection Question(IQ): Many people are getting the bulk of their "news" from web sites and blogs that have no connection to news organizations. Does this create audience confusion about what's fact and what's fiction, what's news and what's nonsense?

Harmon: I think a lot of people have always been confused about the difference between news and commentary, and since we have more sources of information we probably do get more confusion.

IQ: What do news organizations and Web sites need to do to better inform people about where good information comes from?

Harmon: One thing you can do is explain how you get information, how you make news decisions, how you decide what you put on your Web site, how you decide to fill up your magazine, how you gather news, how deeply you source things. I don't see anything wrong with that. A lot of corporations will tell you very clearly how they make a forklift, maybe not how they make sausage -- that gets ugly -- but how we cook this turkey. I don't see why news organizations couldn't be more like other businesses. I think that builds credibility, and it's time to do so. We have seen a lot of evidence lately that there's a looser use of sources and more willingness to use a single source on a story. And now there's the excuse, "Oh well, we had to publish the story. We had to rush it onto our Web site." You have to be careful about that. The public can see when a story has been sourced in a multiple of ways or sourced too thinly.

IQ: What about Web sites where process isn't important to them? The host just wants to get interesting information out and they're not claiming to be the New York Times and maybe the people going to their sites really are just looking for information to reinforce their viewpoint?

Harmon: The marketplace will work, over time, to clean that up because if you're just blogging for free, sitting in your pajamas in the basement, just not getting any money out of this, at some point you might get tired of it or you'll have to go earn some money. If you then try to get subscribers or advertisers, they're going to want credibility alongside their products, same as they always have with newspapers and magazines; they are going to demand that you stick to your guns and get more traditional in how you gather and present information. The marketplace will work its discipline if someone wants to make money on a web site. We've already seen this.

IQ: How about the marketplace of ideas. More and more now in public meetings and even classrooms people will hold up information and say "I found this on the Internet" and present it as information that should be considered as fact?

Harmon: Moderators of discussions and professors at Medill will challenge that. "The Internet" is not a source. Where does this come from? What's the Web site? Who produces the information? If you can't answer those questions and show that it's a recognizable, credible organization with a phone number and an address, a professor wouldn't accept that in a classroom. In other forums it's perhaps disciplined by the audience sitting there, rising up and saying, "Wait a minute. You can't just pull these numbers out of thin air."

IQ: Are audience better informed today, savvier perhaps, because they spent a little more time gathering information about a variety of topics?:

Harmon: In modern life, with 300 million people in the country in a diversified economy, people get specialized in whatever it is they do. So you have people who are more savvy about their own professions than ever before. But they might not know much more in a general sense. They can do an RSS feed that will weed out information they're not interested in. We know that people have a weak grasp, perhaps weaker than ever before, of world geography. A large proportion of people, maybe half, couldn't find Iraq on a map. And I know on the day we pulled out of Somalia many years ago, there was a poll done and half of Americans, after all the headlines, didn't know what continent Somalia was on. That's why newspapers on that day were still running a map of the Horn of Africa. Because they know this about their audience. So I think you have an awful lot of people who know a lot less about the world but know a lot more about their own sphere. The surveys on Americans are not good. We're down in math, reading, writing skills and so forth. It's a hard argument to make that we're getting smarter. The percentage of college graduates under 30 is down. There are more college graduates in the country, but these are older people getting degrees.

IQ: In light of that, listening to what you've said about the way people gather information, is there an opportunity, not governmental, an entrepreneurial opportunity to create a seal of approval, something that would appear on a web site to show that it'd been read by a legitimate news organization?

Harmon: So somebody tries to do what Good Housekeeping did with its "seal of approval." Now that's not government. That was a magazine. They would vet products and recipes. Consumer Reports [link] has done this. There's no advertising in the magazine and they made a business out of it. Maybe somebody tries to do that with news, but you can't do it through government or laws. And the industry can't do it to itself. But some independent, third-party organization - non-governmental, non-industry - could do this.

IQ: Is that something audiences would be interested in, or is it more for people in the news and marketing businesses who want to see legitimate information out there?

Harmon: I'm not advocating licensing journalists or tampering with the First Amendment, but I think it'd be a nice experiment to try commercially. Somebody might be able to make a business out of it, and that would benefit the readers, the advertisers and also the job seekers.

Posted on March 7, 2007 09:25 AM | Permalink

Comments

Since this is my first post, I'm at risk of resurrecting issues that I'm sure have already been discussed at length on this and other Medill boards. But to comment on the Q&A above, I suspect that the primary dynamic fueling the growing popularity of websites and blogs as sources of "news" is not just the convenience of it all, nor the supposed desire of many to hear the reassurance of fellow zealots, but rather the reality that many, many folks have just lost all faith in the objectivity, even the fair-mindedness, of many of the once great traditional news organizations. For example, The NY Times continually shoots itself in the foot here with inaccurate, incomplete and, most importantly, patently biased reporting. On the other hand, many blogs and other internet sources have become a true public service as genuine alternatives to (dare I say it) the "mainstream media." Though one has to perform some due diligence to separate the wheat from the chaff, the responsible sites, whatever their specific views may be, share the virtue of supporting news and commentary by citing thorough research and objective third-party testimony and information.

When choosing whom to believe among the NY Times, LA Times, CBS and the blogosphere, for example, I'll take my chances with the latter every time. And that is truly unfortunate for the honorable profession of journalism.

James Helbig MSJ 73 Kappa Tau Alpha

Posted by: James Helbig | March 28, 2007 12:06 PM

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