Please Freepers let’s be cautious of willy nilly posting of rumors found on the internet. Please refrain from ending up being the first to post some completely bogus information which has been done time and again here.
Tips on verifying, debunking and carefully handling rumors
March 1, 2015 by Steve Buttry
Craig Silverman
Craig Silverman
Journalists and news organizations need to do a better job of avoiding involvement in the spread of lies and unconfirmed rumors.
Accuracy and credibility are the heart of good journalism, and Craig Silverman‘s study Lies, Damned Lies and Viral Content documents widespread disregard for both in the spreading of digital reports by pro.
I won’t attempt to summarize the report here, though I will use some favorite quotes from it at the end of this post. I hope you will read the full report (it’s 164 pages) and consider what it says about you and your news organization.
What I want to focus on here are some suggestions for news organizations and individual journalists, some of which repeat Craig’s own suggestions and some of which are my suggestions, inspired by his report:
Confirming and debunking rumors
To start, I don’t think chasing rumors is necessarily the highest form of journalism, though admittedly, great journalistic investigation starts with a tip that’s indistinguishable from a rumor. But in general, I would encourage a journalistic approach that seeks to find and publish new information rather than chasing rumors.
That said, some rumors are newsworthy and can’t be ignored, and some news organizations have at least part of their operation devoted to aggregation and curation of material published first elsewhere.
Newsrooms should discuss and set standards for whether and how they debunk rumors. Early in my career, many an editor dismissed the suggestion that we should ever publicly address rumors we couldn’t confirm. I remember more than one editor snarling something to the effect that “we don’t publish rumors, we publish facts.â€
Of course, we often researched rumors and published them if we confirmed them as facts. That’s still a good approach. But we generally didn’t debunk the rumors we found out were false. Perhaps that was the right approach back when rumors circulated by word of mouth. But, with rumors being published today in social media, and sometimes amplified by other media sources, I think we should attempt to shoot down the false rumors we bother to check out.
I don’t offer my suggestions as a finished set of standards for you to follow, but as a discussion-starter. The discussion might lead to some better standards that I would gladly adopt in place of mine. But here are my suggestions for an approach newsrooms and individual journalists should take to verifying or disproving rumors:
Don’t publish rumors until you have checked them out (with one exception I’ll note in detail in the crowdsourcing section below).
Don’t check out a rumor unless you would consider it newsworthy if it turns out to be true. In other words, I don’t think news organizations need to chase every rumor that makes it into social media or the competition. But if it’s newsworthy, you should check it out before publishing.
If a rumor would be newsworthy if it’s true, and you check it out, it’s probably worth debunking, especially if it’s circulated widely in social media or has been published in other professional media.
One exception to the point above: If a rumor would be harmful to someone’s reputation and hasn’t circulated widely or been published in other professional media, you should consider whether debunking the rumor would actually give it some level of credibility, and more circulation, and be more harmful to the person’s reputation. As Craig says in the report: “Repeating the rumor bomb detonates it—regardless of context.†You might ask the person how much they’ve been damaged by the rumor and whether they would prefer for you to disprove it or let it die quietly without further attention.
Especially for a local news organization, I don’t think you need to feel responsible for correcting every error that makes it into social media or even all the errors that competing media make. But an occasional story such as the Washington Post’s What was fake on the Internet this week is both fun content and helps set the record straight (and shows a commitment to accuracy).
You should be clear and specific about who erred (when you know) and about how you verified or debunked a rumor. Do it in a factual, non-accusatory way. You’ll make your share of errors, too, and did-not-did-too pissing matches don’t serve anyone well.
be cautious of willy nilly posting of rumors
Shep will do that for everyone
“12 dead” . “Body Armor” must be mental illness.