An Impostor Among Us: Sourcing Problems in Multimedia Reporting

Jake Zuckerman
jz673213@ohio.edu

      Computers, cell phones and tablets are all mediums the public uses to access news, and that reporters use to gather it. By medium, I mean a mediary between information and information-gatherer, and any mediary comes with its limitations. These limitations are leading to unforeseen consequences in modern journalism and public policy.
      A common thread in some of these problems is the availability bias. An availability bias is the human tendency to seek the information most easily accessible. The internet facilitates this bias on a daily basis; when researchers use Google for information, seldom do they look beyond the first page or even the first few results. They indulge in the availability bias when they ignore all the information beyond that first page, instead of narrowing their results.
      An easy way for journalists to gather public opinion is via open internet forums. Modern journalists use comment threads and tweets to gather a general consensus on common topics. But just how solid of a method is such sourcing?
      In a 2002 article published by The Guardian, George Monbiot explains the modern practice of astroturfing. "Messages purporting to come from disinterested punters are planted on listservers at critical moments, disseminating misleading information in the hope of recruiting real people to the cause," Monbiot says. "Detective work by the campaigner Jonathan Matthews and the freelance journalist Andy Rowell shows how a PR firm contracted to the biotech company Monsanto appears to have played a crucial but invisible role in shaping the scientific discourse."

George Monbiot, photo courtesy of Monbiot.com

      After Nature Magazine, a peer-reviewed journal, published an article condemning Monsanto, they received widespread backlash from fake commenters. Following the "backlash," Nature Magazine retracted the article. If a peer edited, empirical journal will retract an article following discreditation from various online "sources," how do we know hard journalism is safe?
      There's a saying in journalism: always open the freezer. The saying began in after a flawed article ran in The New Orleans Time Picayune after Hurricane Katrina. In the original article, journalist Brian Thevenot wrote about a stash of dead bodies sitting in a freezer of a compound he was guided through by a U.S. soldier. He quoted the soldier telling him about the dead bodies, but never walked in to see them for himself. The New York Times and Washington post eventually ran similar follow-up stories. All the while, not one reporter opened the freezer.

Brian Thevenot, photo courtesy of The St. Louis Post Dispatch

     Eventually, all the chaos turned to calm, and widespread corrections had to be made by all the papers when it turned out there were no dead bodies in the freezer; the soldiers heard about it from some friends of friends.
      Thevenot went wrong the same way that Nature Magazine went wrong; neither opened the freezer. Nature Magazine retracted its truthful article when invalid sources claimed its finding were incorrect. Instead of investigating, contacting the sources, or re-reviewing their findings, they followed an invalid medium and got the facts wrong. Thevenot trusted the soldiers, and never broke through his medium (the freezer door) to get the truth for himself.
      New technology fosters the way for an old problem to manifest itself; availability bias. Journalists (the good ones at least) need to cut through this bias. They need to transcend shoddy mediums and get the facts for themselves. No stones should go unturned, and no freezers should go unopened for the proficient journalist in the 21st century.