Accuracy
A medium that allows faster transmission of information also allows fast transmission of incorrect information. Misinformation is not unique to the Internet, but some examples show the unique ways that this misinformation can be spread:
- A conservative radio network passed along a report that Democratic advisor James Carville had spent the night in a Montgomery County, Md., jail after a rampage involving a hunting knife and a semiautomatic pistol. The news had been posted to an Internet newsgroup, where it had been disguised as a report from the Montgomery County Ledger. Howard Kurtz, reporting on the incident for the Washington Post, could not find a publication by that name. He also found that the police spokesman quoted in the story did not exist, Carville lives in Virginia, and the Democratic consultant was out of town on the day in question. 1
- Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune wrote a humor column in which she gave a parody of commencement speeches repeatedly imploring graduates to "wear sunscreen." The column was passed around the Internet via e-mail, but the credit was changed along the way so that many readers thought the speech was an actual speech given by author Kurt Vonnegut at MIT. 2
The Internet and cable news channels also can play a role in bringing misinformation into the realm of traditional news media. This possibility was demonstrated in the case of Juanita Broaddrick, a woman who claimed (then denied, then claimed again) that Bill Clinton forced her to have sex with him in 1978. News organizations knew about her story in 1992, but she wouldn't talk on the record until she consented to an interview with NBC just days before Clinton faced an impeachment vote in the Senate. NBC did what it could to verify information, which took time. Meanwhile, CNBC talk-show host Chris Matthews broached the subject on his show. Shortly thereafter, NBC's hesitancy to run the story became a story in itself, reported by the Drudge Report, Fox News Channel, and the Washington Times. 3
Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach, who described this process in a Washington Post opinion article, have called the process of creating a news story from an unverified report "the journalism of assertion." "First comes the allegation," Rosenstiel and Kovach wrote. "Then the anchor vamps and speculates until the counter-allegation is issued." 4 The authors note that the news organizations reported on NBC's hesitancy to run the story without reporting on the "substance of the allegation." 5 The fact that a news organization is investigating a story has, in essence, become a story of its own, and it is a story that mixes fact and allegation until both are unrecognizable.