Our readers collectively know far more than we will ever know, and by responding to our posts, they quickly make our coverage more nuanced and accurate.
—HENRY BLODGET, EDITOR AND CEO OF BUSINESS INSIDER
Truths are more likely to have been discovered by one man than by a nation.
—DESCARTES
HEN RY BLODGET, IN A REVEALING ONSTAGE interview with reporter Andrew Sorkin, explained the increasingly common cycle like this: “There are stories that will appear on Gawker Media—huge conversations in the blogosphere—everything else. It’s passed all over. Everyone knows about it. Everybody’s clicking on it. Then, finally, an approved source speaks to the New York Times or somebody else, and the New York Times will suddenly say, ‘Okay now we can report that.’ ”
On Twitter you’ll see a common phrase in people’s bios: “Retweets ≠ endorsements,” meaning that just because they share something doesn’t mean they agree with it or know if it’s true or not. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen often jokingly tweets alongside breaking news, “Huge, if true . . .” (in reality, news is meaningless unless true). In White House press briefings and now from politicians themselves we see a version of this attitude: Statements are prefaced with “It’s being reported that” or presented as “alternative facts.” Errors are being defended with “Lots of people were saying it.” Just imagine you’re the guy whose job it is to apologize to the British ambassador because the president stupidly accused British spies of helping Barack Obama wiretap him. Just imagine actually having to say, as a White House official later told reporters, “Mr. Spicer and General McMaster both explained that [Trump] was simply pointing to public reports and not endorsing any specific story.”* I almost pitied Sean Spicer: “All we’re doing is literally reading off what other stations and people have reported. We’re not casting judgment on that.”
Apparently we live in a world where at even the highest and most sensitive level information is passed on without being vetted, where the final judgment of truth or falsity does not fall on the outlet reporting it or the person spreading it but on the readers themselves. As a TechCrunch editor described it, “With social media, there are no editors. There is no waiting for confirmation. When you tweet or re-tweet, you are not checking the facts or even so much concerned if you are spreading a lie. . . . But this is how process journalism now works. It’s journalism as beta.”
Is it any wonder, then, that we are drowning in inaccuracies and mistakes? I don’t think so.
Nearly everyone involved in media and politics is shirking their duty—and that makes them ripe for exploitation (or in the case of American Apparel and CNN, a missile that can strike your company at any time). And yet most of the social media elite want this for our future.
Reporters can hardly be everywhere at once. For most of recent history, media outlets all used the same self-imposed editorial guidelines, so relying on one another’s work was natural. When a fact appeared in the Chicago Tribune, it was pretty safe for the San Francisco Chronicle to repeat that same fact, since both publications have high verification standards.
These were the old rules:
1. If the outlet is legitimate, the stories it breaks are.
2. If the story is legitimate, the facts inside it are.
3. It can be assumed that if the subject of the story is legitimate, then what people are saying about it probably is too.
These rules allow one journalist to use the facts brought forth by another, hopefully with attribution. This assumption makes researching much easier for reporters, since they can build on the work of those who came before them, instead of starting from the beginning of a story. It’s a process known as the “delegation of trust.”1
The web has its own innovation on the delegation of trust, known as “link economy.” Basically it refers to the exchange of traffic and information between blogs and websites. Say the Los Angeles Times reported that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were splitting up. Perez Hilton would link to this report on his blog and add his own thoughts. Then other blogs would link to Perez’s account and maybe the original Times source as well. This is an outgrowth from the early days of blogging, when blogs lacked the resources to do much original reporting. They relied on other outlets to break stories, which they then linked to and provided commentary on. From this came what is called the link economy, one that encouraged sites to regularly and consistently link to each other. I send you a link now, you send me a link later—we trade off doing the job of reporting.
The phrase “link economy” was popularized by Jeff Jarvis, whom you met here earlier. His credentials as a blogger, journalism professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, and author of books such as What Would Google Do? made him an early influential voice in new media. Unfortunately, he’s also an idiot, and the link economy concept he advocated has unquestionably made the media a less reliable resource than it once was.
The link economy encourages blogs to point their readers to other bloggers who are saying crazy things, to borrow from each other without verification, and to take more or less completed stories from other sites, add a layer of commentary, and turn them into something they call their own. To borrow a term from computer science, the link economy is recursive—blogs pull from the blogs that came before them to create new content. Think of how a mash-up video relies on other clips to make something new, or how Twitter users retweet messages from other members and add to them.
But as the trading-up-the-chain scam makes clear, the media is no longer governed by a set of universal editorial and ethics standards. Even within publications, the burden of proof for the print version of a newspaper might differ drastically from what reporters need to go live with a blog post. As media outlets grapple with tighter deadlines and smaller staffs, many of the old standards for verification, confirmation, and fact-checking are becoming impossible to maintain. Every blog has its own editorial policy, but few disclose it to readers. The material one site pulls from another can hardly be trusted when it’s just as likely to have been written with low standards as with high ones.
The conditions on which the delegation of trust and the link economy need to operate properly no longer exist. But the habits remain and have been mixed into a potent combination. The result is often embarrassing and contagious misinformation.
A few years back a young Irish student posted a fake quotation on the Wikipedia page of composer Maurice Jarre shortly after the man died. (The obituary-friendly quote said in part, “When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear.”) At the time, I’m not sure the student understood the convergence of the link economy and the delegation of trust. That changed in an instant, when his fabricated quote began to appear in obituaries for the composer around the world.
It’s difficult to pinpoint where it started, but at some point, a reporter or a blogger saw that quotation and used it in an article. Eventually the quote found its way to the Guardian, and from there it may as well have been real. The quote so perfectly expressed what writers wished to say about Jarre, and the fact that it was in the Guardian, a reputable and prominent newspaper, made it the source of many links. And so it went along the chain, its origins obscured, and the more times it was repeated, the more real it felt.
This is where the link economy fails in practice. Wikipedia editors may have caught and quickly removed the student’s edit, but that didn’t automatically update the obituaries that had incorporated it. Wikipedia administrators are not able to edit stories on other people’s websites, so the quote remained in the Guardian until they caught and corrected it too. The link economy is designed to confirm and support, not to question or correct. In fact, the stunt was only discovered after the student admitted what he’d done.
“I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn’t come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up,” he said. “It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.”2
The proponents of the link economy brush aside these examples. The posts can be updated, they say; that’s the beauty of the internet. But as far as I know there is no technology that issues alerts to each trackback or every reader who has read a corrupted article, and there never will be.
Senator Eugene McCarthy once compared the journalists covering his 1968 presidential campaign to birds on a telephone wire. When one got up to fly to a different wire, they’d all follow. When another flew back, the rest would too. Today this metaphor needs an update. The birds still follow one another’s leads just as eagerly—but the wire need not always exist. They can be and often are perched on illusions, just as blogs were when they repeated Maurice Jarre’s manufactured remarks.
In the link economy, the blue stamp of an html link seems like it will support weight. (As had the links to the Guardian story containing the false quote.) If I write in an article that “Thomas Jefferson, by his own remarks, admitted to committing acts considered felonious in the State of Virginia,” you’d want to see some evidence before you were convinced. Now imagine that I added a link to the words “acts considered felonious.” This link could go to anything—it could go to a dictionary definition of “felonious acts,” or it could go to a pdf of the entire penal code for the state of Virginia, or it could just go to a gif that when you click it says, “Ha! You shouldn’t have trusted me!” But by linking to something, I have vaguely complied with the standards of the link economy. I have rested my authority on a source and linked to it, and now the burden is on the reader to disprove the validity of that link. Bloggers know this and abuse it.
Blogs have long traded on the principle that links imply credibility. Even Google exploits this perception. The search engine, founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were Stanford students, copies a standard practice from academia in which the number of citations a scientific paper gets is an indicator of how influential or important it is. But academic papers are reviewed by peers and editorial boards—shaky citations are hard to get away with.
Online links look like citations but rarely are. Through flimsy attribution, blogs are able to assert wildly fantastic claims that will spread well and drive comments. Some might be afraid to make something up outright, so the justification of “I wasn’t the first person to say this” is very appealing. It’s a way of putting the burden all on the other guy, or on the reader.
People consume content online by scanning and skimming. To use the bird metaphor again, they are what William Zinsser called “impatient bird[s], perched on the thin edge of distraction.” Only 44 percent of users on Google News click through to read the actual article. Meaning: Nobody clicks links, even interesting ones. Or if they do, they’re not exactly rigorous in poring over the article to make sure it proves the point in the last article they read.
There was a great April Fool’s prank a few years ago where NPR created an article headlined, why doesn’t america read anymore? The article looked like it would be a complaint about the decline in reading and critical thinking skills, and so it immediately went viral—shared on Facebook thousands of times. Except if you actually clicked the article, you’d find that what it actually said was:
We sometimes get the sense that some people are commenting on NPR stories that they haven’t actually read. If you are reading this, please like this post and do not comment on it. Then let’s see what people have to say about this “story.”
Countless people fell for that—because they don’t actually click links. They just assume they know what’s behind them, and often they assume the links confirm whatever they want them to confirm.
If readers give sites just seconds for their headlines, how much effort will they expend weighing whether a blog post meets the burden of proof? The number of posts we read conscientiously, like some amateur copy editor and fact-checker rolled into one, are far outpaced by the number of articles we just assume are reliable. And the material from one site quickly makes its way to others. Scandalous statements get traction wider and faster—and their dubious nature is more likely to be obscured by the link economy when it’s moving at viral speed. Who knows how many times you and I have passed over spurious assertions made to look legitimate through a bright little link?
One of the ways that journalists justify their laziness today is by claiming that breaking news deserves special exemptions from their normal obligations to, you know, actually be right and pass along correct information. That during a mass shooting, a fast-moving election night, some unexpected controversy, there isn’t time to do real reporting and so it’s better to just pass along the information they have to readers and viewers as it comes in. There are a lot of words they use to describe this technique: iterative journalism, process journalism, beta journalism. Whatever name you use, it’s stupid and dangerous.* It calls for bloggers to publish first and then verify what they wrote after they’ve posted it. Publishers actually believe that their writers need to do every part of the news-making process, from discovery to fact-checking to writing and editing in real time. It should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for two seconds why that is a bad thing—but they buy the lie that iterative journalism improves the news.
Erik Wemple, a blogger for the Washington Post, writes: “The imperative is to pounce on news when it happens and, in this case, before it happens. To wait for another source is to set the table for someone who’s going to steal your search traffic.”3 So by the time I’ve woken up in the morning, too much misinformation has been spread around the web to possibly be cleaned up. The “incentives are lined up this way,” Tommy Craggs would say while he was at Dead-spin, and we just needed to get used to it.
Seeking Alpha practiced it perfectly on one recent story: “If the newspaper is correct, and I have no way of verifying it, then this stock is in big trouble.” Really? Can’t verify it? No way at all? At its best, iterative journalism is what TechCrunch does: rile up the crowd by repeating sensational allegations and then pretend that they are waiting for the facts to come in. They see no absurdity in publishing a post with the headline paypal shreds ostensibly rare violin because it cares and then opening the article with “Now a lot of this story isn’t out yet and I have a line in to Paypal [sic] about this, so before we get out the pitchforks lets [sic] discuss what happened.”4
Arthur Schopenhauer called newspapers “the second hand of history” but added that the hand was made of inferior metal and rarely working properly. He said that journalists were like little dogs: Something moves and they start barking. The problem is that what they’re often barking at is “no more than a shadow play on the wall.”
Iterative journalists, whether writing for a newspaper a few centuries ago or a blog today, follow blindly wherever the wisps of the speculation may take them, do the absolute minimum amount of research or corroboration, and then post this suspect information immediately, as it is known, in a continuous stream. As Jeff Jarvis put it: “Online, we often publish first and edit later. Newspaper people see their articles as finished products of their work. Bloggers see their posts as part of the process of learning.” Or as Gawker’s former “media reporter” said: “Gawker believes that publicly airing rumors out is usually the quickest way to get to the truth. . . . Let’s acknowledge that we can’t vouch for the veracity or truth of the rumors we’ll be sharing here—but maybe you can.” Jesus Christ.
This “learning process” is not some epistemological quest. Dropping the ruse, Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, put it more bluntly: “Getting it right is expensive, getting it first is cheap.”* And by extension, since it doesn’t cost him anything to be wrong, he presumably doesn’t bother trying to avoid it. It’s not just less costly; it makes more money, because every time a blog has to correct itself, it gets another post out of it—more pageviews.†
The iterative approach sells itself as flexible and informative, but much more realistically, it manifests in the forms of rumors, half-truths, shoddy reporting, overwhelming amounts of needless information, and endless predictions and projections. Instead of using slow-to-respond official sources or documents, it leans on rumors, buzz, and questions. Events are “liveblogged” instead of filtered. Bloggers post constantly, depending on others to point out errors or send in updates, or for sources to contact them.
Iterative journalism is defined by its jumpiness. It is as jumpy as reporters can get without outright making things up. Only the slightest twitch is needed for a journalist to get a story live. As a result, stories claiming massive implications, like takeover talks, lawsuits, potential legislation, pending announcements, and criminal allegations, are often posted despite having minuscule origins. A tweet, a comment on a blog, or an e-mail tip might be enough to do the trick. Bloggers don’t fabricate news, but they do suspend their disbelief, common sense, and responsibility in order to get to big stories first. The pressure to “get something up” is inherently at odds with the desire to “get things right.”
A blog practicing iterative journalism would report they are hearing that Google is planning to buy Twitter or Yelp, or break the news of reports that the president has been assassinated (all falsely reported online many times now). The blog would publish the story as it investigates these facts—that is, publish the rumor first while they see if there is anything more to the story. Hypothetically, a media manipulator for Yelp would be behind the leak, knowing that getting the rumors of the acquisition out there could help them jack up the price in negotiations. I personally wouldn’t kick off reports about the president’s death, because I wouldn’t get anything from it, but plenty of pranksters would.
If a blog is lucky, the gamble it took on a sketchy iterative tip will be confirmed later by events. If it’s unlucky—and this is the real insidious part—the site simply continues to report on the reaction to the news, as though they had nothing to do with creating it. This is what happened to Business Insider when they wrongly made the shocking claim that New York governor David Paterson would resign. The end of the headline was simply updated: “NYT’s Big David Paterson Bombshell Will Break Monday, Governor’s Resignation to Follow” became “NYT’s Big David Paterson Bombshell Will Break Monday, Governor’s Office Denies Resignation in Works” [emphasis mine].5
They should have learned their lesson months earlier, after falling for a similar hoax. A prankster posted on CNN’s online iReport platform that a “source” had told them that Steve Jobs had had a severe heart attack.* It was the user’s first and only post. It was
Business Insider rewrote the lead with a new angle: “ ‘Citizen journalism’ . . . just failed its first significant test.”6 Yeah, that’s who failed here. You know who didn’t? Those who were shorting Apple stock.
And what are the consequences for blowing it this poorly? There are none. “All that can happen,” the famous (and reckless) gossip columnist Walter Winchell once said about one of his breaking scoops, “if it is wrong is that I gooft again.” But hey, at least he was willing to own even that.
Today, as a way of avoiding ever being embarrassingly off base, blogs couch their claims in qualifiers: “We’re hearing . . .”; “I wonder . . .”; “Possibly . . .”; “Lots of buzz that . . .”; “Chatter indicates that . . .”; “Sites are reporting . . .”; “Might . . .”; “Maybe . . .”; “Could . . . , Would . . . , Should . . .”; and so on. In other words, they toss the news narrative into the stream without taking full ownership and pretend to be an impartial observer of a process they began.
For example, these are the first two sentences of New York magazine’s Daily Intel blog post about David Paterson, the former governor of New York:
After weeks of escalating buzz about a New York Times piece that would reveal a “bombshell” scandal about New York Governor David Paterson, Business Insider is reporting that the story will likely come out tomorrow and will be followed by the governor’s resignation (!!). Though the nature of the revelation is still a mystery, reports are that this story is “much worse” than Paterson’s publicly acknowledged affair with a state employee [emphases mine].7
Welcome to Covering Your Ass 101. Nearly every claim is tempered by what might happen or attributed to someone else. Nearly every claim attributed to someone else links to some other site. But what does the writer actually think? What are they willing to own based on their personal reporting and knowledge? Not much. They want to say all they can and nothing at the same time—the height of disingenuous hedging. Which worked out great for Daily Intel, since the story turned out to be totally wrong. Not that anyone learned from the mistake—the posts were just updated with more speculation and guessing. One mistake is replaced by more mistakes.
“There is nothing more shocking than to see assertion and approval dashing ahead of cognition and perception,” Cicero said a long time ago (or maybe I just made it up—are you going to check?). But that’s how it works online . . . on purpose. As they say, it’s not a bug—it’s a feature.
May becomes is becomes has, I tell my clients. That is, on the first site the fact that you “may” be doing something becomes the fact that you “are” doing something by the time it has made the rounds. The next time they mention your name, they look back and add the past tense to their last assertion, whether or not it actually happened. This is recursion at work, officially sanctioned and very possible under the rules of the link economy.
Under these circumstances it is far too easy for mistakes to pile on top of mistakes or for real reporting to be built on lies and manipulations—for analysis to be built on a foundation of weak support. It becomes so easy, as one reporter has put it, for things to become an amalgam of an amalgam.
The link economy encourages bloggers to repeat what “other people are saying” and link to it instead of doing their own reporting and standing behind it. This changes the news from what has happened into what someone said the news is. Needless to say, these are not close to the same thing.
One of my favorite books is Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. Though media mistakes are not the subject of the book, Schulz does do a good job of explaining why the media so regularly gets it wrong. Scientists, she says, replicate each other’s experiments in order to prove or disprove their findings. Conversely, journalists replicate one another’s conclusions and build on them—often when they are not correct.
The news has always been riddled with errors, because it is self-referential instead of self-critical. Mistakes don’t occur as isolated incidents but ripple through the news, sometimes with painful consequences. Because blogs and the media have become so interdependent and linked, a lapse of judgment or poor analysis in one place affects many places.
Science essentially pits the scientists against each other, each looking to disprove the work of others. This process strips out falsehoods, mistakes, and errors. Journalism has no such culture. Reporters look to one-up each other on the same subjects, often adding new scoops to existing stories.
Meanwhile, people like Jeff Jarvis explicitly advise online newspapers and aspiring blogs not to waste their time trying “to replicate the work of other reporters.” In the age of the link, he says, “this is clearly inefficient and unnecessary.” Don’t waste “now-precious resources matching competitors’ stories” or checking and verifying them like a scientist would. Instead, pick up where they left off and see where the story takes you. Don’t be a perfectionist, he’s saying; join the link economy and delegate trust.
When I hear people preach about interconnectedness and interdependence—like one reporter who suggested he and his colleagues begin using the tag NR (neutral retweet) to preface the retweets on Twitter that they were posting but not endorsing—I can’t help but think of the subprime mortgage crisis. I think about one bank that hands off subprime loans to another, which in turn packages them and hands them to another still. Why are you retweeting things you don’t believe in?! I think about the rating agencies whose job was to monitor the subprime transactions but were simply too busy, too overwhelmed, and too conflicted to bother doing it. I think of falling dominoes. I wonder why we would do that to ourselves again—multiplied many times over in digital.
Of course replication is expensive. But it is a known cost, one that should be paid up front by the people who intend to profit from the news. It is a protection and a deterrent all at once. The unknown cost comes from failure—of banks or of trust or of sources—and it is borne by everyone, not just the businesses themselves.
When Jarvis and others breathlessly advocate for new concepts they do not understand, it is both comical and dangerous. The web gurus try to tell us that this distributed, crowdsourced version of fact-checking and research is more accurate, because it involves more people. But I side with Descartes and have more faith in a scientific approach, in which every man is responsible for his own work—in which everyone is questioning the work of everyone else, and this motivates them to be extra careful and honest.
The old media system was a long way from perfect, but their costly business model at least tried to find independent confirmation where possible. It advocated editorial independence instead of risky interdependence. It was expensive, sure, and definitely unsexy, but it was a step above the pseudo-science of the link economy. It was certainly better than what we have online, where blogs do nothing but report what “[some other blog] is reporting,” where blogs pass along unverified information using the excuse “but I linked to where I stole it from.”
To simply know where something came from, or just the fact that it came from somewhere else, does not alleviate the problems of the delegation of trust. In fact, this is the insidious part of the link economy. It creates the appearance of a solution without solving anything. Some other blog talked to a source (don’t believe them? here’s the link) so now they don’t have to. That isn’t enough for me. We deserve better.
* Even more absurd, the “public report” was actually just a comment by an on-air contributor to Fox News with no foreign policy background, who was later pulled because of it.
*See Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion for a discussion of blogs’ premature and overblown coverage of the 2009–10 Iranian protests and the subsequent crackdown on activists and social media in Iran.
*I’m sure he appreciated the irony of this in 2013 when many blogs, including Gawker, wrote posts accusing him of sexual assault. Oh wait, Arrington denied the charges and threatened to sue. †From an SB Nation post about the NFL lockout: “There are 382 more updates to this story. Read most recent updates.”
*I imagine these repeated and exhausting rumors of Jobs’s death made it all the more painful for his family when they were eventually placed in the position, three years later, of announcing that he had actually passed away. No family should have to posted at 4:00 a.m. It was obviously a hoax. Even the site MacRumors.com, which writes about nothing but rumors, knew this post was bogus and didn’t write about it. Nonetheless, following its iterative instincts, Business Insider’s sister blog, Silicon Alley Insider, rushed to advance the story as a full-fledged post. Apple’s stock price plummeted. Twenty-five minutes later, the story in tatters—the fake tip deleted by iReport, the rumor denied by Apple—worry: Are people going to believe us? or Will he get less than his proper due because the public’s patience has been wasted through so many premature reports?