This past Sunday saw the death of former Penn State head coach
Joe Paterno. Though the final months of his life were plagued by
controversy for his firing in Nov. over a sexual-abuse scandal, his
passing was capped by the
erroneous reporting of his death via Twitter the night before
it had actually happened. While it was a student-run news website,
Onward State, that "broke" the news, The Huffington Post and CBS
Sports, among others, now famously ran with the story without doing
the due diligence to confirm whether or not it was true. This
unleashed a firestorm of backlash and a pretty funny #CBSsportsreports
trend. Though this certainly isn't the first time that a major news
outlet has gotten a story wrong, it illustrates a larger problem
behind reporting Tweets as sources, calling into question the
credibility of some of our most trusted news outlets.
Twitter has increasingly become a major destination for breaking
news. But even in the last year, there were false reports on the
firing of Piers Morgan from CNN and the month-too-early
death of Steve Jobs (ironically reported by CBS's "What's
Trending" - I guess they didn't learn their lesson the first time),
the latter of which resulted in a drop in stock price. We shouldn't
have to question the validity of our news, and it's this kind of
irresponsible reporting that should have no place in our daily
cycle of information. It begs the question though, how are these
unverified reports making their way into the mainstream?
One can attribute this dissemination of misinformation to the
increased competition among news organizations for eyeballs.
However, this rush to be first can lead to some dangerous
repercussions - not only in having to submit the requisite apology
letter, but to suffer the wrath of bloggers and critics like
myself.
Twitter can be a great source for breaking news because of its
very own design in allowing people to Tweet what they're seeing.
However, any decent reporter should know to verify their
sources, and multiple retweets of a single source does not a
verification make. Instead, I fully support the approach that Reuters blogger Felix
Salmon takes when cultivating news stories on Twitter.
He said back in July, "one of the things I like about Twitter
is that it behaves in many ways a lot more like a newsroom than a
newspaper. Rumors happen there, and they get shot down - no harm no
foul." Just like a newsroom, reporters need to verify those rumors
before they're printed. Until then, hopefully the embarrassment
over publishing an unverified story based on a Twitterumor
(trademark pending) will serve as a cautionary tale for those
considering taking the same risky chance to be first.
By Justin Ordman, senior account executive at Solomon McCown
& Company