Advantage: Liars. Fact-checking vs. Lying Liars

Marty Perlmutter
August, 2012

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” —Winston Churchill

There may be more opportunities to fact check and debunk than ever, but this actuality bumps up against a human tendency this is even more stubborn. "People seem to find it easier to believe rumors that they wish were true or that seem to fulfill a desire to hear the worst," writes Tuscaloosa (Ala.) News city editor Katherine K. Lee. Liars and manipulators can be more persuasive than the press, even with a growing corps of fact checkers and verification specialists. Reporting and fact checking is not the same as convincing people of a verifiable truth.

The author sums up the conundrum this way: "The forces of untruth have more money, more people, and … much better expertise. They know how to birth and spread a lie better than we know how to debunk one. They are more creative about it, and, by the very nature of what they're doing, they aren't constrained by ethics or professional standards. Advantage, liars."

We may hope that we are on the threshold of a new age of Internet curation and fact verification. But in truth, the struggle between liars, manipulated information consumers and rumor debunkers is only now being joined, and must be fought on proliferating platforms. The future of journalism and indeed of verifiable truth hangs in the balance.

A New Age for Truth

Craig Silverman
Nieman Reports, Summer 2012

In a handbook for aspiring journalists published in 1894, Edwin L. Shuman shared what he called one of the "most valuable secrets of the profession at its present stage of development."Join the conversation on twitter using the hashtag #NRTruth

He revealed that it was standard practice for reporters to invent a few details, provided the made-up facts were nonessential to the overall story.

Truth in essentials, imagination in nonessentials, is considered a legitimate rule of action in every office…The paramount object is to make an interesting story.

A reporter following Shuman's advice today would likely find his fabrications swiftly exposed on social media. Bloggers would tally offenses and delve deeper. People with firsthand knowledge of the story in question might step forward with photos and videos to contradict the invented details. Media watchdogs, press critics, and others would call out the reporter and his employer.

In the same vein, a politician or public figure who publicly asserts a falsehood is likely to be called out by fact-checking organizations such as FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.

Never before in the history of journalism—or society—have more people and organizations been engaged in fact checking and verification. Never has it been so easy to expose an error, check a fact, crowdsource and bring technology to bear in service of verification.  Read more…

Latest Word on the Trail? I Take It Back

Jeremy W. Peters
The New York Times, July 15, 2012

The quotations come back redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative.

They are sent by e-mail from the Obama headquarters in Chicago to reporters who have interviewed campaign officials under one major condition: the press office has veto power over what statements can be quoted and attributed by name.

Most reporters, desperate to pick the brains of the president’s top strategists, grudgingly agree. After the interviews, they review their notes, check their tape recorders and send in the juiciest sound bites for review. Read more…

Study Finds Media Overwhelmingly Repeat GOP "Job Killer" Allegations With No Verification

Adam Shah
Media Matters, June 14, 2012

Media have overwhelmingly repeated claims by Republican politicians and corporations that government policies are "job killers" without citing any evidence for this claim according to a new study. And today's news reporting demonstrates the study's point.

Media MattersOccidental College professor Peter Dreier and University of Northern Iowa professor Christopher Martin found media stories in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Associated Press with the phrase "job killer" have spiked since President Obama took office and that since 1984, "in 91.6% of the stories alleging that a government policy was or would be a 'job killer,' the media failed to cite any evidence for this claim or to quote an authoritative source with any evidence for this claim." Read more…

Where to Find the Awkward Tweets Politicians Deleted

Eric Randall 
The Atlantic Wire, May 30, 2012

The Sunlight Foundation just launched a really fun, vast new site called "Politiwoops" that collects all the tweets that politicians have deleted from their Twitter feeds in the past six months. As Sunlight, which is dedicated to government transparency, explains in a blog post unveiling the site, the collection of thousands of tweets includes hacked missives,typos, and awkward lines that didn't land well. There's Rep. Jeff Miller asking, "Was President Obama born in the United States?" There's President Obama promoting articles in The Atlantic.(And then backtracking!) The site is very elegantly built, seeming to operate a lot like Twitter itself.

Who among us hasn't felt the sinking feeling when you hit send and realize that perhaps you shouldn't have? Read more…

Rupert Murdoch: ‘Not a Fit Person’

Martin Perlmutter
May, 2012 

After months of deliberation, Ofcom, the British broadcasting oversight board, submitted a report on the unfolding hacking case. They concluded that Rupert Murdoch is “not a fit person” to run a media conglomerate. In so stating they seemed to go beyond the scope of their purview, perhaps adumbrating more severe chastisements that pend – possible loss of broadcast licenses in Britain unless management of News Corp. and its broadcast holdings is radically revised.

In the immediate aftermath of the hacking scandal, they closed the News of the World, Britain’s leading scandal sheet and highest-circulation weekly. James Murdoch resigned the chairmanship of the broadcasting division of News Corp. Some forty individuals in the company and in government were arrested and testimony taken. 

All of this has triggered a round of reflection among journalists concerning what is, and what isn’t, acceptable behavior in pursuit of headlines and stories. Bill Keller of the NY Times took a particularly deep look at the foibles, and mortal sins, of Fox News, as it has continued to pretend to be a “news” outlet while abdicating any moral or practical claim to that stature. In his op-ed, he details his reasoning. It is a piece that any practitioner or aspirant to the Fourth Estate should internalize.

Major criminal and civil consequences continue to unfold. We seem to be only at the late morning of this corrosive but curative process. It will be clarification of the moral strictures of journalism and the mortal consequences of radical deviation therefrom. 

Murdoch’s Pride Is America’s Poison

Bill Keller
The New York Times, May 5, 2012

Jennifer S. Altman/Contour by Getty ImagesI would never suggest that what is now called “the mainstream media” — the news organizations that most Americans depended on over the past century — achieved a golden mean.… 

But we try to live by a code, a discipline, that tells us to set aside our personal biases, to test not only facts but the way they add up, to seek out the dissenters and let them make their best case, to show our work. We write unsparing articles about public figures of every stripe — even, sometimes, about ourselves. When we screw up — and we do — we are obliged to own up to our mistakes and correct them.

Fox does not live by that code. (Especially the last part. In a speech at the University of North Carolina last month, Ailes boasted, “In 15 years, we have never taken a story down because we got it wrong.” Gosh, even the pope only claims to be infallible on special occasions.) For a salient point of reference, compare Fox’s soft-pedaling of the Murdoch troubles with the far more prominent coverage in The Wall Street Journal, which has managed under Murdoch’s ownership to retain its serious-journalism DNA. Read more…

After 7 Years, No End in Sight to Phone Hacking Scandal

Ravi Ssomayia
The New York Times, May 16, 2012

LONDON — The phone hacking scandal that shook Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire and hit the heart of the British government began quietly on a Monday in 2005, when aides to the British royal family gathered in a palace office appointed with priceless antiques to air suspicions that their voice mail messages had been intercepted.

Noah Berger/Associated Press

Seven years and dozens of arrests later, the day after the latest criminal charges were brought, information from the police, prosecutors and investigators indicated Wednesday that the investigations are likely to go on for years, with no obvious end in sight.…

There are three current police operations, Scotland Yard confirmed: Operation Weeting, which is examining illegal voice mail interceptions, currently employs 95 officers and staff members and has made 22 arrests; Operation Tuleta, which is looking into computer hacking, employs eight and has made three arrests; and Operation Elveden, which is exploring illegal payments by journalists to public officials, employs 29 and has made 28 arrests. Read more…

Ex-Murdoch Editor Brooks, Five Others, Charged Over Phone-hacking Scandal

msnbc.com, May 15, 2012

LONDON - Rebekah Brooks, a close confidante of Rupert Murdoch, was charged on Tuesday with interfering with a police investigation into a phone hacking scandal that has rocked the tycoon's empire and sent shockwaves through the British political establishment.

"I have concluded ... there is sufficient evidence for there to be a realistic prospect of conviction,"Alison Levitt, the principal legal adviser to Britain's Director of Public Prosecutions, said in a statement.  Read more…

Media Influence: The Mohamed Merah Affair

Corine Ganem
April, 2012

After the shock caused by the Toulouse shooting on March 19, 2012, the unanimous reaction was solidarity with the Jewish victims' families.  This attack was soon proved to be connected with the slaying of three French paratroopers, who were Muslims, while a fourth soldier, from Guadeloupe, was left in coma.  Silent, dignified marches took place in Toulouse and Paris, with banners that read: "In France, they shoot Blacks, Jews, and Arabs."  

Pundits keep debating how Merah could have reached this point. Did recent fictional works–"La désintégration", which describes the rise of radical Islam in the suburbs; "Les hommes de l'ombre", which starts with a terrorist plot during the French Presidential election campaign–play a part in Merah's thinking?

Mohammed Merah claimed that he had sought revenge for France's military involvement in Afghanistan, and for the murder of Palestinian children by Israeli forces. He confided having watched on TV news about the shooting rampage in Afghanistan, the previous week. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict being also a major theme in the French media, he may well have been comforted in his beliefs by the coverage of such controversial issues.

Real-time broadcasting leaves us little time to think critically. The information conveyed or withheld shape our world vision. Was Merah a loser, or a monster? Was he manipulated? Who helped him edit the film sent to Al-Jazeera? All these questions are voiced on websites, blogs, and Twitter, expressing a healthy skepticism, sometimes exposing contradictions and lies in mainstream media. Out of these multiple voices, some truth may emerge. 

Frederic Helbert Tweets

Frederic Helbert
Twitter, March 21, 2012

La police, les autorités, annonceaient une traque, une chasse longue. Elle savait qu'elle serait courte. Enquêteur ##DCRI

The police, the authorities, said that the hunt would be long.  They knew it would be short... 

Les forces de sécurité et politiques ont mené une vaste "opération" d'enfumage alors qu'ils préparaient leur opération. #Toulouse

Security forces and political [authorities] have been throwing up a big smoke screen while building their operation. #Toulouse

Who Gets to Be French?

Karl E. Meyer 
The New York Times, April 11, 2012

Four members of Parliament belonging to President Nicolas Sarkozy’s center-right party[,] in a joint statement,... insisted that Mr. Merah “had nothing French about him but his identity papers.”

Nonsense, retorted the left-wing journal Libération: “Merah is certainly a monster, but he was a French monster.” A childhood friend of Mr. Merah provided a poignant elaboration: “Our passports may say that we are French, but we don’t feel French because we were never accepted here. No one can excuse what he did, but he is a product of French society, of the feeling that he had no hope and nothing to lose. It was not Al Qaeda that created Mohammed Merah. It was France.” Read more...

Al Jazeera Not To Air French Killings Video

Al Jazeera Europe, March 27, 2012

Al Jazeera has said it will not air a video that it received showing three shooting attacks in Toulouse and Montauban in southern France this month. The network on Tuesday said the video did not add any information that was not already in public domain. It also did not meet the television station's code of ethics for broadcast. Read more...

Commentary: BFM TV, i-Tele and France 3 mistakenly announce Mohamed Merah's Arrest

Julien Bellver

Translated and adapted, April 1, 2012 from Ozap.com, March 21, 2012

On March 21st, since the start of the RAID’s operation at 3:00 am, news channels competed for the hottest scoops and exclusive testimonies. Following statement of Home Secretary Claude Guéant and the information recorded on the spot by their special correspondents, they proposed special editions for more than ten hours. At 2:17 pm, BFM TV announced the arrest of Mohamed Merah: “According to [reporter] Rachid M’barki, the suspect would have been arrested”.  The news was stated in the conditional tense, however the text scrolling at the bottom of the screen read, “Mr Merah, alleged Toulouse and Montauban killer, has been arrested by the RAID in a building in Toulouse.” At 2:21 pm, the information was passed on by i-TELE, and soon Le Point followed suit. At 2:35 pm, France 3 confirmed that the suspect had surrendered to the  French security services, “unarmed, without violence, and without any condition”. The news was relayed by social media, until it was refuted by LCI a few minutes later. Read more (in French)...

Video: BFM TV, i-Tele and France 3 Mistakenly Announce Mohamed Merah's Arrest

BFM TV, i-TELE et France 3 annoncent par erreur... par puremedias