Let me be perfectly clear: The only thing that's different now from 20/50/100/1000 years ago is speed and scale. There have always been mobs, and rumors, and reporters so hungry for the scoop they don't check the source or confirm the facts with anyone. Technology just allows us to be irresponsible jerks quicker.
We need to be better than this. We are not. I have no anwers.
When Luke Russert, who is the child of two famous journalists, can't get it through his head not to do this, I am not hopeful. That used to be the upside of staying in the family business. You were supposed to pick up the craft.
When the political editor of Buzzfeed pretends that he is part of some avant-garde bit of the Internet which is why he posted the (unsubstantiated) Weiner story, I am not hopeful--but I am laughing.
And when CNN can't apologize for being a chief agent in ruining a woman's life--even when she tried to correct them over and over again--well, people, we are kind of screwed.
These are links to longer stories by On the Media or the New York Times, with summaries taken from the first part of the stories.
Sorry about the paywall, kids. As people are too fond of telling us, we are in a New Age of New Media.
http://www.onthemedia.org/2013/jul/26/dirty-laundering/
This week, the gossip website The Dirty posted screenshots of explicit chats between an anonymous woman and New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner. Even though the legitimacy of the screenshots could not be confirmed, other news outlets ran the information, and within hours Buzzfeed had identified and named the woman in the chats. Brooke talks to McKay Coppins, Buzzfeed's political editor, about reporting, transparency, and veracity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/magazine/should-reddit-be-blamed-for-the-spreading-of-a-smear.html
On an overcast day in early May, I traveled to suburban Philadelphia to visit the family of Sunil Tripathi, the deceased 22-year-old Brown University student who, for about four hours on the morning of April 19, was mistakenly identified as Suspect No. 2 in the Boston Marathon bombings. The Tripathis had just arrived home after nearly two months spent in Providence, R.I., where they went to organize the search for Sunil, who disappeared on March 16. When I entered the house, Judy Tripathi, Sunil’s mother, asked me for a hug. In a shattered voice, she said, “I need hugs these days.” We sat at the kitchen table and talked, and at one point Judy handed me a photo of a young, smiling Sunil, caught in the motion of throwing a ball. “Look how happy he looks,” she said. For the next two hours, she and her husband, Akhil, and their daughter, Sangeeta, described what happened to them in the early-morning hours of April 19, and how the false identification of their son derailed their ongoing search for him and further traumatized their lives.
In the summer of 2009, Neda Agha-Soltan became the face of the Iranian Green Revolution after her tragic death by gunshot was caught on cell phone camera and uploaded online for the whole world to see. The international media rushed to put a face to the victim--but the face they used was that of another Iranian woman by the name of Neda Soltani, who was still very much alive. Brooke speaks to Neda Soltani, author of
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