EDITORIAL: In era of instant news, old journalism tools are valuable
Published 1:30 am Tuesday, March 13, 2018
We at The Beachcomber — well, those of us that are old enough, anyway — find ourselves longing more and more for the days of typewriters, printing presses and Walter Cronkite delivering the news in the evenings. Technology is wonderful, don’t get us wrong, some of us are very attached to our digital items. But with the speed and ease that these evolved machines have brought to every day tasks, comes a heavy price or two. And the one staring us in the face this week is the devolution of journalism.
You might be thinking that train left the station some time ago, have we been living in a cave? This is, after all, the era of “fake news.”
While it’s easy to be cynical and make jokes about the current state of the media, it can be just as easy to forget that at the heart of any story, are real people.
And we have written about one of our own this week, an islander whose son suffered a violent assault a couple of years back, and who unfortunately spent the past few weeks believing that Washington State University had given the assailant — a member of the Cougars’ football team — an award for completing his court mandated community service. That is what was widely reported, at least, across many media outlets, including Sports Illustrated. The internet did its thing and there was tremendous collective outrage, as would seem fitting, if, in fact, the story was accurate.
The problem is, that is not really what happened.
The bigger problem is that none of the media entities that sent this story far and wide across the digital globe bothered to practice the fundamental basics of journalism: no one picked up a phone or even sent an email to WSU to fact check, confirm, or even ask a single question to get its side of the story. They simply regurgitated an incomplete and inaccurate press release and presented it to the public as fact.
Have we really fallen so far down the insta-news rabbit hole that a long-established media organization like Sports Illustrated can’t even be bothered to make a phone call any more? Are its veteran writers/reporters too lazy or jaded to even care?
In this case the end results were significant negative backlash toward the player, and shock, anger, disappointment and heartache for the victim and his family. All completely avoidable, if only the media had done its job properly, or even at all.
At The Beachcomber it is common for us to receive press releases from businesses, organizations or groups, and for people to ask that we print them as “articles” in the paper. There are several reasons why we always say “no,” and this story is a perfect example of the primary reason why.
A press release is a PR tool, not a news story.
Checking facts should be as automatic as a reflex for any journalist. We shouldn’t have to give up on the integrity of information for the sake of creating snarky, social media fodder.
