One of my biggest gripes with the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace is the utter laziness of journalists from supposedly reputable papers. SMH and The Age, I’m talking to you. It seems that whenever anything newsworthy happens, journos go straight to Facebook or Myspace and lift photographs, quotes and comments and report them as news.
An example from the SMH talking about shooting victim Kaera Douglas.
VIVACIOUS and naughty, an online snapshot of the life of shooting victim Kara Douglas shows a woman who enjoys living dangerously and “anything fast”.
Her hobbies are standard, “shopping, swimming, running, going out, being in love” and her desires are average: “fashion, my friends, eating out, spirituality”.
She likes watching Desperate Housewives, Australia’s Next Top Model and crime shows. She loves magazines, and describes her mother as the “most amazing person God ever put on this earth”.
Yep, watching Desperate Housewives, going shopping and eating out are definitely living dangerously and asking to be shot. Top marks for investigative journalism.
Anyway this will hopefully become a thing of the past with the news that in the UK a woman is suing 6 newspapers after they reported a wild and crazy teenage party that had loads of underage sex, underage drinking, theft and the mother of the party thrower punching her daughter in the face. The lazy journos picked up the story from the daughter’s Bebo page, where she’d written an extensive report on how wild the party was. Unfortunately for the journalists, she’d made it all up.
The case is expected to have far-reaching consequences for third parties who use or publish information from social networking sites. Lawyers say it could place a duty on all second-hand users to establish the truth of everything they want to republish from such sites.
…
Her solicitor, David Price, said the case raised important issues of libel, privacy and copyright in relation to the unauthorised use of material taken from social networking sites. “Teenage conversation has always involved a large amount of embellishment…, but until recently it has not been communicated in a way that can potentially be accessed by the mass media,” he said.
Mrs Hudson said her daughter has also suffered greatly because of the breach of her privacy. “Jodie is 15 years old,” she said. “She did not consent to the publication in the media of any photograph of her or her party, or of any material that she wrote on her Bebo site.”
Journalists take note - you might have to go back to the old-fashioned method of reporting that actually requires you to speak to people and maybe check a few facts before you hit “publish”.
This post is tagged under: random thoughts
hmmm..interestingly high minded…but I’m sure the chastened hacking hack hacks have checked your credentials in the directive-giving department and are duly upping their game…
Yes, it’s a loop isn’t it? The great 2.0 hum of self-indulgent over-inflated self importance does mean that there’s more stuff left lying around.
I guess the problem with your first example is there’s an assumption by the east coast broadsheets of a level of sophistication in the reading audience. Seems they are using the social network info in the first snip to illustrate - “..an online snapshot..” (oops - cutting and pasting!) rather than substantiate the report.
Your second snip, though you don’t mention, relates to a legal issue (in the UK) where the very issue of copyright is being tested. Good luck drafting the kind of draconian censorship
that’s going to be needed to protect your 2.0 flock from their inability to recognise and interact with one of the very basic underlying concepts of the internet itself. Meanwhile….
And then obviously if we follow through on your logic: fact-free, opinion-burdened bloggers would have to give up their cutting and pasting…er…pontificating… for good.
What a tragedy that would be!