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Thursday, February 18, 2010
Are budget cuts to blame for Vancouver Sun’s (inaccurate) report of Gordon Lightfoot’s death?
UPDATE: It turns out that the original prank wasn’t a tweet, but rather a phone call to a friend of the singer, who believed the report and passed it along. But Twitter got the blame anyway. GigaOm’s Matthew Ingram posted a detailed account today.
When tweets began flooding Twitter with reports that Michael Jackson had died, I resisted what I’ll admit was a very strong temptation to retweet the news. It was only when TMZ published confirmation that I felt comfortable broadcasting the sad news to my own followers.
I know TMZ may not be The New York Times, but it’s run by Harvey Levin, an attorney and former legal correspondent for the news operation at KNBC, the NBC affiliate in Los Angeles. TMZ may be filled with sleaze, but it doesn’t report unconfirmed stories as fact.
Mainstream media confirmation tends to be my benchmark. Far too many death rumors have circulated on Twitter (Jeff Goldblum, for instance, and Johnny Depp), only to be revealed as hoaxes that well-meaning people were all too ready to amplify through the retweeting process.
Professional journalists, on the other hand, verify information—usually from multiple authoritative sources—before publishing it.
After today, however, I’m rethinking my policy. Not that I’ll retweet reports of celebrity deaths the instant I receive one. No, I’m rethinking my reliance on traditional mainstream media for validation of the report’s accuracy.
As I watch Tweetdeck update, I see Twitter teeming with reports that iconic Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot is not dead. There’s radio audio available of the singer himself confirming his continued presence among the living, along with stories in publications like The Globe and Mail noting that earlier reports of Lightfoot’s death was a hoax.
I did retweet the first message I saw, which came from a trusted friend. I retweeted it because of my friend’s source. It wasn’t Twitter. It was The Vancouver Sun, where the story appeared along with a Canwest News Service copyright notice. The story has since been removed.
It’s too easy to accuse the Sun of rushing the story in order to get a scoop. I suspect budget cuts have more to do with it. As newspaper budgets decline, fact checkers are among the first to be let go. Reporters are being laid off, too, creating a burden on the staff that remains, especially given the demand they already faced to produce more copy to accommodate the online world. Some reporters are expected to crank out three or four articles a day.
Or it could be that most of the Sun’s reporters are too busy covering the Olympics to verify information like this, which Lightfoot’s manager says began with a tweet originating in Ottawa.
The Sun isn’t the only media outlet to repeat the story. Evidently (according to Lightfoot himself in the audio interview referenced above), he was getting calls from people who heard it on the radio. (The radio stations were citing reports from “out west,” which may well have been the Sun.)
Comments left to the Sun’s report before it was taken down were savage. Here’s a sampling:
Gordon now task of phoning his family members to tell them he is not dead before they read a garbage story like this. Gord heard he was dead driving in his car.
Canwest is probably sending Kevin Newman over there to whack Gordon right now, to maintain the journalistic integrity of the story.
Unbelievable! If I did my job as poorly, I’d have been fired long ago.
Nice to know you guys are such a reliable source. Someone needs their arse kicked over there and then send an apology or at least flowers of condolences to Mr. Lightfoot.
There is one silver lining to the story: Lightfoot’s music is suddenly in rotation; he’s getting more airplay, he says, than he has in years.
But that’s little comfort to me. If I can’t trust the mainstream media to get this stuff right—and the wrong information is originating in The Crowd—who can I trust?
