Scott Swanson
I suspect I’m not the only one who takes breaking news broadcasts with a grain of salt.
Here’s an eager-beaver, usually young, reporter on the TV screen as smoke billows in the background and emergency response workers scurry by, breathlessly telling us that 50 people are missing in the huge explosion at such-and-such.
Three hours later, we learn that everybody’s accounted for and most of the staff had actually gone home when the blast occurred.
It’s not that these reporters are necessarily exaggerating or even trying to sensationalize the situation. It’s just that they, and often their sources, haven’t been able to adequately substantiate the facts in a rapidly changing course of events.
This used to be a problem more common to the broadcast media, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, with the use of the Internet by newspapers to post breaking news, we print journalists face some of the same challenges.
I’ve mentioned before how we’ve gotten at least one story wrong, initially on the internet, because of rapidly changing events. I won’t go there again, but I was reminded once again, recently, of how wrong things can go in a hurry in this business.
Here at your local newspaper we put very heavy emphasis on substantiating information we receive and publish.
In today’s world, it’s becoming more difficult to determine whether something is true or not, even if it’s coming from a source we might trust, like a good friend’s Facebook page.
That’s one reason why we try to do things the old-fashioned way – substantiating facts from official sources, those who are most likely to be in the know.
In saying that, I realize it’s certainly possible that we may not always have everything, but that’s our goal.
Occasionally we hear from people who’ve been cited for some offense that the cops got it wrong in their case and that the real story is something different than what we printed. That may be true, which is why we try to make it pretty clear, in stories or in our Public Safety report, where the information we publish is coming from. We might not be able to vouch for the accuracy of what we’ve been told, but we report the source so readers can draw their own conclusions.
In an imperfect world, which would readers rather see – the official record of what happened or some of the pure fiction that’s out there in social media? More on that in a moment.
Sometimes our effort to substantiate might seem almost ridiculous. There are certainly plenty of situations in which we could write off the cuff about things that are happening in the public arena. We often know what is not to create news. We report it. So we interview people who are involved in the situation we are covering and we report what they tell us, even if it’s something we might already know.
It’s important that readers know where news is coming from.
Certainly, in some situations we’ll report what we’ve witnessed ourselves, but that’s more the exception than the rule. If there’s an argument in a government meeting, we might describe the give-and-take as we witnessed it. And certainly, when we’re covering sports, there’s a lot more of our own observations in stories than might be true of other news.
As we’ve said before on this page, though, the world we live in is characterized by spin and often-self-aggrandizing exaggeration, without a lot of attention to precise details. It’s also a world in which social media, e-mail and the internet can spread information at blinding speed.
I recently had an experience that illustrates how fast things can go cock-eyed for even an earnest journalist trying to do the right thing. Someone I know well sent me a photo of a wildfire jumping a highway – the one at the right.
The photo was purportedly shot near the Cable Crossing fire that was burning down in the Glide area and the person who sent it to me told me that it was shot that day on Highway 138. They’d gotten it via e-mail on their smart phone.
It’s certainly an impressive image (especially in vivid color, which we can’t reproduce on this page) and I thought to myself, “I wonder if the newspaper in Roseburg has seen this?” I know people there, so I e-mailed it to one of them.
Back came an answer, rather abruptly. The photo was NOT from Southern Oregon; NOT shot that day; and NOT Highway 138. They’d already had three people try to submit it before my e-mail arrived.
In reality, it was from a National Geographic website, posted in 2004 – 11 years ago. It was shot by a fire management officer in 2003 during a Southern California wildfire near Lake Arrowhead, in the San Bernardino Mountains and the road in the photo is Highway 18.
Well, that was interesting, and a little disturbing, because the photo had come to me from someone who I know quite well and who would not deliberately lie about something like that. We were busy putting a newspaper together, so I didn’t have a chance to follow up, to find out how the original source (for us) got hold of the photo.
Two days later I saw the photo again, this time in an e-mail from someone I know who lives in Grants Pass. Same story – delivered with all the sober, awed assuredness one appropriate for such a photo. Wow.
I made some inquiries. I was told it came from Facebook, “identified as OR 138 fire.” I did a Facebook search and, sure enough, I found another copy, posted by someone I’d never heard of with the description “This is Between 138 / Diamond Lake /Glide.” …
There’s not much of a moral to this story except that traditional journalistic rules still apply. One of my crusty journalism school profs would hammer it into us: When you’re sure you have it right, check again. And then, double check.
That’s what I was taught when I started out in journalism and, really, nothing’s changed – except that there’s even more factual quicksand out there, created by social media.