Michael from AppleGazette.com, who is one of my favorite bloggers and podcasters, often criticizes the lack of fact checking by blogs. It seems like in every other episode of Apple Gazette Daily he has at least one rant about news blogs not correctly confirming their information and spreading misinformation, and he even criticizes himself on the subject. I have to fully agree with what he says.
Many blogs don’t have any sort of procedure for confirming information beyond looking at other blogs, which is just plain silly. Web 2.0 is basically the period in time in which the Internet has become the modern gossip arena. It has essentially become: “He said that she said that they said that my cousins uncle’s sister’s dead grandfather’s friend said…” While getting information out quickly is important, especially if you are a news blogger, getting the information at least somewhat correct is much more important. Incorrect news does nothing but hurt your reputation.
It also seems to me that many news blogs cite other blogs (or worse… Wikipedia) as their sources. Take any article on a news blog and there is a 50% chance that its cited source will be another blog, which will link to another blog, etc. This infinitely long linked list is the reason why false information spreads like wildfire online. Nobody does fact checking, and nobody links to the real source.
So, what do you think? Should news bloggers do more fact checking? Should they spend 5 seconds to find the originating source of the information and link to it, possibly in addition to their source? Do you think it really matters since blogs aren’t major media sites? Please share you thoughts in the comments.
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March 3rd, 2008 at 1:50 pm
What sort of fact checking do you suggest? Searching more websites for the same information? Who is to say whether they all got the info from the same, possibly erroneous, source?
If the information originated from a big news site, rather than a blog, does that make it more trustworthy? Not saying you’re wrong.. just curious what you think constitutes proper fact-checking.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Since I can’t seem to write a response in a few quick words, I’m going to do another post about what I mean by fact/source checking as well as my thoughts on good, confirmed news being twisted and warped by both bloggers and the big media to look like something completely different (eg: quotes being taken out of context). Expect the post in a day or two.
March 5th, 2008 at 11:37 am
[…] a previous post I asked whether or not news bloggers should do more fact checking. In this post I’ll share a few tips for fact checking. Most of these are easy to follow and […]