Why won't they Get It?

People Who Just Don't Get It; Volume 4: 24-Hour "News" Outlets who quote people's Twitter feeds and call it news.


The advent of 24-Hour news outlets has come along with the advent of figuring out how to stretch 30 minutes of news into 24 hours of crap. Some ways to do that are through making news out of non-news (ie: A bear gets loose in a neighborhood near the woods), hyperbole (ie: The WORST STORM EVER!), and through opinion/editorializing (ie: Twitter).


One of the long-held tenets of journalism is accuracy, which can be accomplished through fact-checking and multiple sources. Well, when you decide that this sort of thing isn't important, you can just give credit to your single source, regardless of the veracity of that source. Here's a great example: ""Jeremy Is In The Office is the best website in the world," reports Jeremy of Jeremy Is In The Office., an online repository of Instant Messenger Status Messages."

While it's clearly presented as an opinion, it's written in the news, and since it has a citation showing that it came from somebody other than the author of the story, it's obviously a correct statement, and you base your opinion on that statement. Forget the fact that you have no idea who "Jeremy" is, or the fact that he may be biased toward Jeremy Is In The Office, but you saw it on the news, and therefore, it's right!

This silly little example (while misguided, since you all know Jeremy and believe that this is the best website in the world, but we'll ignore that for now) may seem a little far-fetched, but pick any article on CNN or Foxnews or any of your favorite 24-hour news outlets. You have an 83% chance of seeing a reference to somebody's Twitter feed in that article, based on a study where I thought about numbers and thought that 83 was about right. It may not be 83, but it's higher than it should be. Also, every last one of these articles and sites now has a "User Comments" section where people are free to spread their own opinions and hyperbole about the article, or about the other opinions. Now you have opinions of opinions being interpreted as facts...and that just makes things worse.

And just how does this all manifest itself in News? Is it simply harmless misinformation, or can it actually be used for ratings-based fear-mongering? See for yourself with this headline from Foxnews.com:

Or perhaps this one from ABCNews.com:

Then there's CNN.com:

Based on these editorialized headlines, you may be inclined to think that a second-coming of Chernobyl is about to happen, or else, a huge nuclear-weapon scale explosion is imminent which will cause untold devastation to not only Japan, but the rest of the world.

Simply put, this is not the case.

For an actual explanation of what's going on with the reactors, you should probably spend about 10 minutes reading THIS WEBSITE instead, which provides an actual scientifically-accurate description of what's happening without the editorializing and fear-mongering which will bring readers back to websites. The differences between this actually informative article, and the opinion-based ratings-grab that is the article on any of the other "News" sites make it pretty clear who is out to report news, and who is desperately out to fill 24 hours with content, without regard to accuracy or relevance.