Techno-tabloid journalism

Greg Saunders at This Modern World passes along a jaw-dropping quote from former New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent, which, in Greg’s words, “pretty much says all you need to know about modern newsrooms”:

I also believe that columnists are entitled by their mandate to engage in the unfair use of statistics, the misleading representation of opposing positions, and the conscious withholding of contrary data.

By coincidence, this quote arrived at the same time as a typically insightful post from Lawrence Lessig, who starts by talking about conflicts of interest that potentially influence bloggers who accept advertising and then moves on to a much bigger issue:

[T]he more I’ve talked about this with observers and friends, the more I think the real fear is not bloggers tempted by ad revenues. It is instead the emergence of the equivalent of tabloids in blog-space: commercial entities whose sole purpose is to generate ad revenue, who do that by being as ridiculous and extreme as possible.

The danger here is that the conflict has returned. Just as the British tabloids care little about the truth in their path to selling papers, commercial blog-loids care little about the truth in trying to attract eyeballs. And it is here that the cycle turn vicious: for the amateur space feeds the professional troll by careful and repeated efforts to show that claims made are false or outrageous. If you’re paid by the click, who cares why people click.

This creates a dilemma for open and honest disagreement about the facts. For here there is a conflict in interest: the interest of the amateur journalist is not the interest of the professional troll. Yet the only way the amateur can do his job — by quoting and criticizing — is to feed the troll.

Exactly. There’s a profound parallelism between these two posts. Good riddance to Okrent, who nominally worked for the newspaper of record as an advocate for the public and thinks nothing is wrong when column inches in his paper are used to shape public opinion by lying, deceiving, and withholding the truth. That’s the domain of Pravda, not the New York Times.

And I see plenty of journalists, reporters, and analysts in the technical press who think nothing of printing an outrageous story without bothering to check its details, because their job is to get lots of click-throughs and page views and generate maximum ad revenue. In fact, the more outrageous and ridiculous the statement, the more traffic they get. Doesn’t matter whether they’re right or wrong, it’s all about the click-throughs.

If you’ve followed by work for any length of time, you’ll know this is a common theme for me. I sometimes feel like I’m banging my head against a brick wall trying to correct the mountain of misinformation out there on some topics. There are a handful of sites I won’t link to at all, because to do so is to reward bad behavior. Sadly, I’m in the minority on this score. Sensationalism sells, and a short, punchy, well-packaged lie spreads faster than a more complex but truthful story. Corrections rarely get even a tiny fraction of the publicity that a mistaken original gets.

I don’t have a snappy, optimistic ending for this. All I can say is that a healthy sense of skepticism is more valuable now than ever before.