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CHAPTER 1

Fact-Mongering Online

Emily Bell

When it became obvious to the whole world that the internet was neither a passing fad nor likely to remain a network used only by programmers and academics – probably sometime around 1996 – a curious thing happened.

The 'real world' of mainstream media began to gravitate around the most logical and probably the least defensible position it could: that the internet was a conduit for the perverted, the distorted and the untrustworthy. This network of limitless connectivity which might, with the most limited imagining, be the single most empowering publishing technology since Gutenberg invented the printing press, was instead vilified as a home of the con artist and the paedophile. Fuelled by an investment profile akin to that of tulips in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, flaky and over-valued, the popular image of the internet could hardly have been worse. It not only attracted pornographers and rapists, but it also apparently made smug and not necessarily very talented young people exceedingly rich; it bailed out the advertising industry and made rock stars out of computer nerds and venture capitalists – just how wrong could one technology be?

At the heart of this collective suspicion seemed to be a belief that anyone who used the internet for almost any purpose at all was almost certainly up to no good. In 2001 the Selby train crash was a marker of just how embedded this idea had become. The man who caused the accident which killed ten, Gary Hart, had fallen asleep at the wheel of his Land Rover and driven off the road, down an embankment on to a railway line causing the fatality. He received a penal sentence of five years, with the judge stressing that his failure to sleep before his journey was the equivalent of drunk driving. But the aspect of Hart's sleep deprivation most avidly dwelt on was what had caused it: 'Hours of internet chat led to Selby' read the headline in Newcastle's Evening Chronicle, another report in the Scotsman described Hart as inhabiting 'the shadowy world of the internet', as though this was in itself an illegal act. His cavalier use of the internet, it seemed, was a signifier of his character.

So this haven of the shifty and dubious was for a long time treated by many in the media as a byword for the untrustworthy. I recently found a piece written in 1997 from, of all places CNet, the online technology news site, entitled 'Truth, lies, and the internet', which highlighted an internet spoof, where a speech which was allegedly made by the author Kurt Vonnegut to the University of Chicago was in fact a column from the Chicago Tribune. 'The fact that a message can circulate from its point of origin or a circle of people to all corners of the worldwide network is the Net's greatest and most garish feature.'

Certainly in determining what the internet would do to the currency of news or 'truth', if one accepts that there is such a concept, this is what worried most commentators. Inauthenticity of information or testimony it was agreed would prove to be an enormous problem when the distribution bottleneck for news content was abruptly severed by the rise of the internet. But the idea that false 'facts', or deliberately malicious lies would run amok tampering with our perceptions and undermining the democratic process was the kind of thinking which belongs more to the old media than to the new media.

In the old media the malleable issue of what constitutes the truth is in the hands of proprietors and editors. If the 'truth' is that Britain should not be in favour of a European constitution then one might expect a paper's coverage to bleed with this perception – stories of Eurocrats straightening our bananas and flooding us with unwanted immigrant labour come to the fore. Subtler issues of governance in a pan-national world are suppressed. The old way would be to publish facts through a branded conduit, let's for instance say the Daily Mail, and then these facts might have a limited lifespan being debated between individuals or very occasionally through other media, but barring accident or libel action, this version of the truth would sit on cuttings files, in libraries and even electronically searchable archives. What this world feared was the unlicensed fact monger spreading incorrect information indiscriminately and this too passing into some vast archive of fact and counterfact.

But what has happened is quite different. To illustrate how the internet has helped to promote truth every bit as much as, if not more than, it has threatened to distort it, I can draw on a painful and personal example. In 2003 following the invasion of Iraq, I was in charge of the Guardian's website when we ran what might be politely termed an erroneous story. Without going into the hows and whys, an editor had picked up on an article from a German paper which had carried a speech given by Paul Wolfowitz the then deputy defence secretary for the US in the Far East. It was not a conference that had been widely covered and it had somehow slipped under the radar of most of the Western press. The translation suggested that Wolfowitz had said something he had not – that the invasion of Iraq was underpinned by a desire to control the oil resource. He had mentioned oil extraction and Iraq but not in the way it was reported in our story.

I had not been in the office, but within about four hours of the story being published, I was aware that all might not have been right, as emails began to trickle in with the subject field 'Wolfowitz'. This was late evening and by the early morning, when America had had a chance to read the story and kick it around, the trickle was a deluge. We had taken the story down and ran a very prominent retraction being clear about our error. If we were operating in the old world where media was distributed not electronically and instantly but within a much narrower circulation, the error would have been just as grave, but would have certainly survived longer while it reached the parts of the world – such as the Pentagon – where those who knew most about its accuracy could immediately challenge its veracity.

It was the case in the very early days of news websites that one could rely on the 'not wrong for long' motto to keep you out of trouble – make an error, take it down quickly and your relatively small audience would be none the wiser. But as the web has expanded, as search tools such as Google have proliferated and when experts can call in all stories they are interested in to their own news wires via RSS readers (Really Simple Syndication), the transparency and the challenge ability of your reporting becomes ever more open.

For newspapers in particular this development is highly unsettling. Think of the national daily newspapers in the UK – eleven titles selling somewhere over 12 million copies a day all told, each with its particular angle on the news. Each community around that newspaper might 'trust' the paper's brand – for instance the Daily Mail has a strong community and a large readership which trusts the paper implicitly. But if stories are regularly qualified or knocked down by other sources, denied and re-edited by those perhaps who are even involved in the stories then at some point the level at which a newspaper is trusted begins to falter. Once the context into which you publish your stories alters from the 'safe' environment of your regular readership to the whole world, when your headlines appear on Google News alongside other contradictory stories, then it is far harder to defend the 'truth' of your reporting.

The New York Times' experience with the rogue reporter Jayson Blair, who filed copy which was fabricated or plagiarized, demonstrates that in the world of high-pressure competitive news, the temptation to believe and run stories rather than interrogate their authenticity is overwhelming even for the most austere newspapers.

So the inevitable rise of the web has not led to quite such a proliferation of falsehood as was originally expected; instead it has facilitated a more open examination of facts and journalistic presentation than was previously the case. The American technology journalist Dan Gillmor, whose book We the Media predicted the erosion of the hierarchy of news provision as citizen journalists and bloggers rose in number, has a nifty phrase which is handy for journalists to remember: 'There is always someone closer to the story than you.' And with publishing technologies so readily available anyone can tell that story or question other versions of the truth. Distressingly for the mainstream media what the new-media thinker Clay Shirky describes as the 'fame versus fortune' model is in the ascendant now that anyone can distribute their content. In other words there is a generation of bloggers or citizen journalists who will make their thoughts, accounts and pictures free on the web – they may enjoy the fame that goes with the exposure but essentially they are hobbyists, not motivated by money and status, often with full-time jobs elsewhere.

There are several oft quoted examples of the power of the blog versus the traditional media construct. Maybe the most notorious case to date was that of the CBS news story aired in the US on 8 September 2004 – where Dan Rather introduced an item which cast doubt on President Bush's military record. The story relied on four memos, but bloggers, including one known as 'Buckhead', questioned the authenticity of the memos based on what they knew of typesetting in the early seventies (the fonts and spacing on the CBS memos looked like word-processed documents). A maelstrom of criticism and pressure which followed ultimately saw Rather step down from his post.

The bloggers of the Republican right claimed victory. But this might prove the power of the blog or it might prove that blogs are as capable of misleading as the mainstream press in its worst mode. A highly considered article published in 2005 in the Columbia Journalism Review by Corey Pein pointed out that the supposed findings by the bloggers had been followed by an avalanche of mainstream coverage which converted rumour and speculation into fact and failed to make a proper examination of all aspects of the story – the speed and ferocity with which such a counter-claim moved was enough to end Rather's career and weaken CBS's reputation before the official inquiry into the affair had even concluded.

At the last count there were 27 million blogs worldwide with tens of thousands a day being added to that number. Although trying to quantify the blogosphere is all but impossible there are estimates at the time of writing that 275,000 entries are added to blogs on a daily basis and the readership of blogs across the world is somewhere around the 50 million mark. Within this modern day Babel one could argue that it is even harder to decide what might be truthful and what might be exaggerated. So won't the 'trusted' distributors of fact thrive in this environment?

Well perhaps. But as we know, in an increasingly transparent world, trust is difficult to build and easy to squander. One of the targets of politically motivated bloggers is the mainstream media's scepticism about their chosen cause. In fact what we see from bloggers is not a substitute for the mainstream press but often a replica of its best and worst attributes. High-profile bloggers tend to be white, male and middle class, they tend to divide into those who are keen to share knowledge and those who are anxious to make their view prevail. According to which category they sit in, their contributions are either enlightening and enriching or prone to selectivity and distortion – in other words pretty much a mirror to the mainstream media.

The faltering of public trust in mainstream media which is an inevitable consequence of a highly competitive and commoditized news market, has allowed organizations to use the new digital tools available to them to tell their story without mediation. In the UK's 2005 election campaign New Labour dramatically scaled back its engagement with the 'press pack', conducting choreographed photocalls and launching a series of email and blog services to keep the electorate 'informed'. But because of course it lacked any of the openness associated with the internet – no free commenting on the blogs for instance – it felt like a sorry pass at telling it like it is, it made the party feel more opaque rather than less so and it made the role of the traditional media inquisitors seem therefore more valuable.

Finding the truth can, to some, be an overrated concept. But there does seem to be in general a human instinct to uncover the truth rather than to live in blissful ignorance. Take for example the most famous example of a community-built archive – Wikipedia – an online evolving encyclopedia which anyone can add to or edit. It is not the last word in resources – again some sections are rich and balanced and others are a little lopsided, according to the enthusiasms and knowledge of those who amend the site. But on the whole it is remarkably accurate, given the overwhelming mess it could be – even small errors are diligently corrected. In online communities where recommendations are rated – the Amazon book review system is probably one of the most widely known – there will always be elements who seek to distort the system for their own gain, who lodge a good or bad review based on something other than honest opinion, but when there is a weight of opinion within these communities they can produce a more balanced picture.

The emergence of new technologies was greeted with high anxiety that they would distort and bury the truth. It is not clear that the evolution of the internet necessarily brings us any closer to knowing what the real truth is or enables us as journalists to report it, but it has created the tools whereby everyone can contribute to what the truth might be. I say everyone, but of course this is still a divided society in terms of the information haves and have-nots, there are barriers of literacy and wealth. But these are infinitely lower than the barriers to traditional publishing.

For corporations, journalists, academics, citizens and politicians, the new information hierarchies will take some time to adjust to. The sheer volume now of available source material makes it likely that errors or false reports will circulate, but the open-ended nature of the discourse means that the power to correct those reports is greater than it ever has been. My view then is essentially that of an optimist – that we are entering a new age of enlightenment for mass communication. The concerns that all change is for the worst have already been confounded, and the era of a society atomized by mass communication rather than united by it is over. And there is no reason why truth should be the casualty of this particular revolution.

2006.

CHAPTER 2

A Make-Believe World

Sarah Benton

The notion of truth in journalism is startling. It is not expected in modern industrial societies. It comes from another world, of philosophy or religion, and only flourishes in sects whose members are bound by the conviction that they alone have seen the truth. The modern media is understood to be a self-sufficient world of artifice and illusion; to demand that journalists speak the truth seems as irrelevant as asking a conjuror to use no tricks. Even in the court room we doubt that the truth is told despite pledges of the whole truth and nothing but the truth being sought and spoken. The demand for forensic truth-telling lingers on from an infinitely remote time when the idea of truth was an aspect of the survival of the soul and public confession of the truth was the goal of a trial process. Those who are not expected to tell the truth constitute that tawdry cluster squirming in the pit of public esteem: estate agents, politicians, used-car salesmen, PR people and journalists.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Where the Truth Lies"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Julia Hobsbawm.
Excerpted by permission of Atlantic Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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