If It’s On The Internet, It Must Be True

This past week, formerly unknown actress Elyse Porterfield fooled millions playing Jenny, the Dry Erase girl, who quit in a clever hoax. Right now, I guarantee other pranksters are dreaming up new schemes to fool you again. And journalists, who at one time were tasked with protecting the public from such lies, no longer have the same power to block them.

The media has reporters and editors in place to prevent hoaxes from going public. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Some truth, some crap. I think the author goes too far in painting traditional media as all sweetness and light, full of ethical virtue, and Keepers of the Integrity™. The issue with news is that it takes time to gather the often fragmented bits of information, makes sense of it and check that it’s correct. Even though the transmission of information is much faster these days, the old restrictions on gathering still pretty much apply. So in the days before 24/7 news and online reporting, sitting on a story and letting people confirm the information didn’t have the same implications as it does today. So I think there’s a little bit of confusing this inaction with virtue — they were rarely tempted. The Dry-Erase hoax did get Tech Crunch to bite, after all — they ran the story concurrent with reporters following up, not after.

The snippet about Dan Rather “buil[ding] a career after being first to report on the Kennedy assassination” conveniently ignores that his career at CBS ended after a story turned out to be based on fabricated evidence. And it’s not like the mainstream media never reports erroneous information, and worse, repeats it without checking. Al Gore invented the internet, right?

The speed of the internet helps hoaxes spread more rapidly, but it also lets us check with trusted sources faster as well. In the early days of email we had hoaxes, which continue today, but now there are places to check, like Snopes. And Twitter may be a way that a hoax spreads, but it was also an important conduit for information during and after the attack on Mumbai on 2008. The advantage of places with editors, I think, is that there are resources for multiple channels of information, allowing them to cross-check. The real question is the extent to which they will continue to be tempted to break a story without confirming it, knowing that the rest of internet is out there.