Jimmy Palmer
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GIGO: An acronym that stands for "Garbage In, Garbage Out".
If inaccurate or wrong data is input then inaccurate or wrong data will be output. This is a fundamental fact of computer science. GIGO is usually caused by user error. Obviously there are dozens of ways for a user to make mistakes when inputting information into a computer. Over the decades we computer guys have devised ways to double check the input to make sure the data seems reasonable but in the end there is no way to know that the user meant 6 instead of 5. It is easy to imagine the faulty calculations based on a simple error like 6 instead of 5 but I think there is a much more dangerous type of GIGO that has just recently started to show up in society.
The internet is an amazingly powerful communication tool that is accessible to almost anybody that is interested. Throughout human history average people have had very few options for getting their thoughts and opinions published and distributed to other people. The internet has changed all of this. This website is an example of how easy it is for an average person to write down their opinion and have it seen by potentially millions of people. I pay for my server and my bandwidth and thus I have the ability to publish any thought that enters my mind. In fact I recently read that there are over 50 million blogs. I will make a random assumption that seventy percent of those are spam and so we are left with over 15 million actual blogs. The vast majority of those sites are like this one and get very little traffic but a few of them get millions of visitors per month.
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.
In the United States we are blessed with having a free and open press. Not all news organizations are "fair and balanced" but then again not all news is biased either. Certainly most news organizations have developed in a culture that slants the organizations view in one direction or the other. However, historically in the US we have been able to trust that our news outlets were telling mostly the truth because there were quite a few news agencies and they tended to be very competitive. This competition served as a self-regulating checks-and-balances system. If one news agency got something wrong then the other news agencies would surely point it out.
The side affect of all this competition was that the news agencies took great care to make sure they had their sources correct and that the story was not just a rumor. Most journalists pride themselves on getting the story right. Most journalists try very hard to uncover news that is important. Most journalists recognize that they represent a news organization that will not tolerate bad reporting. The news organizations are nothing without their good reputation and one bad journalist can destroy that. In the same way one good journalist can bring down the wrath of society onto a bad situation. Good journalists should be praised and bad journalists should be ridiculed.
FUD: An acronym that stands for "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt".
Contrary to the way that traditional news agencies checked and re-checked each other the blogsphere copies and rehashes each other. Imagine the following scenario which happens almost daily:
A reputable news agency reports on a story and publishes it to their website. A blogger, Blogger A, reads the story and thinks that his readers should hear about this. Blogger A writes a summary and a new headline for the news article and creates a link to the original story. Blogger A's readers, who are also bloggers, read the summary and decide that their readers should also hear about this. Blogger B writes a summary of the summary and yet another headline and then creates a link to Blogger A's article instead of the original story. Blogger C writes a summary of the summary on Blogger B's site and links to Blogger B's summary. This continues hundreds and thousands of times with very few of the bloggers ever actually reading the original news story.
Its like the game that children play called Telephone. The idea is that one person repeats a sentence that they were told by another person. This repeats over and over down the line with one person whispering to the next. By the time it gets to the end of the line the last person gets a sentence that rarely resembles what was told to the first person. Everyone embellishes or misunderstands the sentence in some way.
Now this game is happening in these blogs with thousands of different people all trying to tell the same story in a different way. What is worse is that each blogger also tends to add commentary or editorial to the story to make the story more interesting. The farther you get away from the original story the more editorial you get and the less news you get. This happens at an alarming rate; normally these stories will flame up and burn out in just a few days. The more sensational or damaging the story is the faster it spreads and the bigger it grows. With the speed of the blogsphere and the size of the readership it is easy to see that tens of millions of people can read these stories everyday.
Now Consider What Happens If The Story Is Wrong.
The side affect of these stories growing and burning out so quickly is that very few people ever bother to do follow-up research or bother to verify the story in the first place. Even if a story is wrong, very few bloggers will bother posting a retraction. Retractions do not make for good headlines. Retractions do not get trackbacks. Retractions mean that the blogger has to admit that he was wrong. Since a blogger does not have an editor and the blogger does not have a publisher then the blogger does not have anyone to justify his inaccurate reporting to. Since the blogger's readers are mostly other bloggers then the readers do not expect him to be held accountable because they do not want to be held accountable themselves.
It is a very vicious circle that feeds on itself. Everyone is expected to voice their opinions. Everyone is expected to re-tell the news. Everyone is expected to spread gossip. No one is expected to be held accountable. Ironically some of the stories in the last few years that have been the biggest in the blogsphere have been stories about reporters that made mistakes. The one stands out in my memory the most is Dan Rather's Memogate.
I wrote this article because I have been disturbed by the numbers of obviously false stories that have made it onto some of the internet's most prominent websites. I plan making this a regular column on this site so that I may share with you some of the bad publishing that is taking place on the web. I encourage you to read these posts critically. I am falable and I will make mistakes. I do not have an editor and I do not have a publisher. My pleage is that I will try with due diligence to make sure what I report to you is correct.
Jimmy Palmer