Journalism has always been something of a race: a kind of infinite relay race where whoever gets the story first briefly pulls ahead of competitors. Often, the temptation to cut corners can overcome otherwise respectable news outlets, and misinformation gets distributed.
Take for instance the classic example of 1897 reports of Mark Twain's death. While visiting England, Twain's cousin fell ill and the New York Herald mistakenly thought that Twain himself was ill.
While false obituaries haven't been entirely uncommon in history, the advent of technology has accelerated the rate at which bad news stories get distributed and reported on as fact, most notably through social media.
Twitter has proved to be a valuable asset to reporting and journalism, but it has also shown its dark side with recent reports of the death of Penn State football legend Joe Paterno.
At 8:45 p.m. on Saturday, community news site Onward State tweeted that Paterno had passed away. Later, it posted again stating that Penn State football players had received an email confirming the information.
The story took off like a bat out of hell. Soon, it wasn't only followers of Onward State that heard the news, and more and more major outlets began tweet that Paterno had passed away. Even CBS Sports tweeted the information and wrote a story on their site about the death.
At first, their story contained no attribution, which quickly became a problem for CBS Sports. As it turns out, a spokesman for the family contradicted the reports and told other sources that (at the time) Paterno was fighting for his life against lung cancer.
Oops.
Blowback came as swiftly as the story broke. The managing editor of Onward State resigned, and its general manager posted a lengthy apology and explanation. Originally, a hoax email had been sent to athletes, and through sloppy reporting on the ground it was erroneously confirmed.
Even in light of Paterno's real death less than a day later, what Onward State did was terrible and an affront to good journalism. It chose the easy option over the tough decision to confirm information.
Things don't end there, however. The outlets that reported on the death with nothing but a tweet to go off of are even more shameful, especially when it's as big of a name as CBS Sports or the Huffington Post.
Not all news sources published the false information; in fact many reveled in confirming the reports to be false. However, the issue doesn't just come down to having a little egg on your face.
Sites like CBS Sports have gained a level of trust with its large readership and viewership, and have trampled on that confidence by not only blatantly attempting to steal a story, but one that was based only on a tweet from a small college publication.
We're all allowed to make mistakes. In an attempt to win a leg of the relay, a little college publication cut corners to beat out its competitors and failed. Of course, The Spectrum holds itself to a high standard and wouldn't allow such a thing to happen, but we do slip up, and we expect to be held to the same high standards as any publication, big or small.
Lets just say we won't be reporting on a tweet as if it were fact any time soon.
