Two weeks ago I saw this story on the front page of CNN's website and, for reasons that are not clear to me in hindsight, I wasted five minutes of my life reading it. It is typical human interest fare about the escalating violence in Mexico, with drug cartels shooting each other and innocent bystanders in droves while the police are (apparently) powerless to maintain order. The CNN piece focuses not on the social, economic, and political causes of the escalating violence but on a pair of poster children – two bright college-aged men gunned down in the crossfire.
I guess that's more appealing than talking about the PRI, NAFTA, and the voracious appetite of yuppies and their children for illegal drugs in the United States.
What strikes me about this story is…well, here are a few non-consecutive quotes. Let's see if anything looks odd.
"The Mexican government expresses its most deeply felt condolences to the families," the Interior Ministry said in a release on its Web page.
Separated in death, the two young men seemed inseparable in life. A Facebook page that demands justice for the slayings shows more than 30 photos of the young men and offers a snapshot of lives fully lived even at a tender age.
Mercado, an athlete, is shown working out on the rings at a gymnastics club and winning a medal and a trophy in track and field competition, where he was a pole-vaulter.
buy stromectol online www.actualidadmedica.com.do/wp-content/languages/themes/po/stromectol.html no prescriptionAnother photo shows him kneeling between two German shepherds. He's wearing a cap, blue jeans and a T-shirt and has a bemused look on his face.
Arredondo seemed more the social one, with photos of him with his arm around a young woman at what seems to be a party. Another photo shows him posing with a World Cup trophy display.
At least two Facebook pages are devoted to them: "Rest in Peace Jorge Antonio Mercado Alonso and Javier Francisco Arredondo" has more than 12,600 fans; "Javier Arredondo and Jorge Mercado – JUSTICIA! JUSTICE!" has more than 4,700 members.
Combined with the last 1/4 of the story, which consists of quoting posts on a Facebook wall, this story creates the distinct impression that the "reporter's" research consisted of looking at Facebook for a couple of minutes. He also thoughtfully visited a government website and cut-and-pasted a quote from a Minister. Nice work, Scoop McGee.
We are seeing more and more of this lamentable practice. Newspaper and TV news stories about things reporters found on Facebook. Stories in which the sources are Facebook status updates (or Twitter posts). References to Facebook to support grand generalizations about social phenomena. Mentions of how many fans such-and-such organization or politician have on Facebook. In fact, just watch the news on TV and see how long it takes before Facebook is mentioned.
You need not set aside a lot of time for this experiment.
A stunning 89% of journalists told a GWU survey in January that they do story research on blogs, twitter, Facebook, and lesser social networking sites. The hottest job in the media industry is apparently "social media coordinator." Wolf Blitzer (and everyone else on CNN, possibly under threat of execution) ends every segment with a painfully awkward reminder to viewers to check out his Tweets on CNN.com. The mainstream media have an apparent love affair on their hands.
Is this reporting? Five French journalists holed up in a farmhouse in February without telephones or general internet access – their only means of communication were Twitter and Facebook. This stunt/experiment showed both the power of social networking doodads to keep them relatively well informed while also emphasizing the severe limitations. It underscores the point that social media are just another set of tools for communication. In the hands of a lazy industry, however, they're becoming more of a crutch than a tool. Developing ideas for new stories, doing research, getting quotes, and double-checking sources all mean the same thing now: check Twitter, dick around on Facebook for a while. Given that today's reporters are little more than stenographers – "Fact checking? What's that?" – this really is the logical next step. An industry this lazy can't help but take the path of least resistance, so we have a lot more quotes from Facebook walls to which we can look forward in the coming years.
neal says:
CNN has a website?
Nunya says:
Worse than this, a lot of reporters of them are fed a great deal of their stories by PR firms. They receive something in their inbox that seems relatively well written, they do a quick edit and send it out.
Journalism just doesn't pay what it used to and productivity expectations are just too high.
Don't believe much of what you read.
fuzzbuzz215 says:
Ive been saying for awhile now that facebook is like the Delorian from "Back to the Future." Sure, it sounds fun but it really causes more problems than it solves.
Also, this is really just an effort on the part of CNN and other broadcasters to reign in the internet (as the internet has swiftly undercut their ratings and relevance) and to appeal to the 15- 25 crowd. Either way, facebook sucks.
Sator Arepo says:
Don't forget shameless, verbatim quotes from Wikipedia.
Julie says:
I don't see utilizing facebook as a bad thing as long as it's not treated as a primary source. Facebook has the benefit of being a medium that most people are familiar with, and it provides an instant connection to the reader who already understands the social scape on that site. So, for a story like this where the point is essentially to forge a personal connection to the tragedy I think it makes more sense.
The fact is that people are living out their social lives more and more online and as a matter of course we're going to be reading about it in the media. But I'm with you in that I think the trend of forsaking fact-checking for expediency and trendiness for relevancy has got to go.
HoosierPoli says:
I stopped watching TV news when suddenly every news anchor suddenly had a laptop in front of them and were apparently reading the news off the internet verbatim. Not to mention half the "breaking news" video is now sourced from "YouTube"
CNN is the worst at this (like they are with just about everything). If you haven't seen this bullshit, their anchors LITERALLY read people's twitter updates to you. Not only is it aggressively shallow, but they are also asking the powerful rhetorical question, "Why the hell are you even watching TV at all anymore? We just get our shit from Facebook too. There's nothing we're giving you that you can't already get for free".
Mike D says:
But generating original material is so hard.
Grace Nearing says:
If you haven't seen this bullshit, their anchors LITERALLY read people's twitter updates to you.
That was the point when I stopped watching CNN America. Wolf Blitzer's annoying but-but-stutter is one thing, but tweets are another.
moonbat says:
Katie Couric "journalism".
HoosierPoli says:
Seriously though, the media can die rotting in an open grave, and the only epitaph will be "What took you so long?" A few choice weeklies and periodicals are still managing to pump out the good stuff (I have a soft spot for the New Yorker and The Economist) and the rest of the burning trash heap can slide into the ocean for all I care. The iPad fetishism is the last desperate gasps of the old media, honored motto "In liberium uns suckentandem est" (translation: we suck so bad at this shit that the 21st-century equivalent of Ham radio has raped us twelve ways from Sunday).
Crazy for Urban Planning says:
HoosierPoli really summed up my thoughts much better than I can. Television should die tomorrow and I wouldn't care.
Nunya says:
HoosierPoli,
My Latin is rusty but I will refrain from checking based on the sheer awesomeness of your dictum.
Crazy for UrbanPlanning: Does that include Glee AND American Idol?
bb in GA says:
Some of y'all young 'uns might not be familiar with the term "Rip and Read" News anchors in the 20th century (especially on local news) when reporting on national or international events would rip the perforated printer paper off the AP or UPI teletype machines and read the report verbatim. No teleprompter or laptop in front of them, just paper. The complaint is valid, but hardly new.
//bb
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