Broken News

Replacing accuracy with speed in reporting has made for a broken media landscape

I got a text message this morning, November 1st, 2013: “Multiple gunmen storm into LAX. Are you watching this?” Another contact wrote to tell me that Christian radicals had taken siege of one of the US’ largest airports. My Twitter feed read like the writer’s room from ‘Homeland’: a CIA official is dead, it was an off-duty Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent, it was Al-Qaeda (the standard, reflexive answer to the appearance of terror or crisis in the post-9/11 world). The list went on—an online, virtual shouting match had started, with reputable news agencies competing for air time with that guy from MythBusters. Within short course, information was turning into a sludge of leads rather than investigated fact and Canada’s largest newspaper was forced to concede that it had fallen for a hoax regarding the fallen CIA chief.

In crisis situations, the need for news is exacerbated. Terrorist situations in particular prey on confusion as a kind of worry-inducing setting. Terrorism disrupts our normal activity and incites panic. We turn to media for answers because the unknown stirs up a well of contingent possibilities. If the suspects aren’t identified and caught, the threat remains omnipresent.

The fact that people look to media for answers and clues in breaking news situations is itself not problematic, but it ignores that our media landscape has changed radically. One of the democratizing values of social media is that it frees media creation—news-making is today highly tailored, individualized, and diffuse. The thresholds to entry are also incredibly low—and so it is quite possible to emerge online with little expertise, knowledge, or material to contribute of investigative merit. And we might think that this itself is a problem, the tearing down of the gates of the media establishment has created a world where anyone can be a journalist, but I would say not so fast. More people talking and, indeed, this morning, even yelling, isn’t by definition a problem. The problem is a larger question of media literacy and the hyper-individualizing of news.

More people entering the online discourse is itself not problematic, but it does demand that we resist the temptation to move too fast, to surrender thoughtfulness for speed. We need to become more media literate. We need to understand the way the media we engage with works—and we need to hold that awareness of how the material gets made in our minds as we consider what’s appearing on our screens. Rather than simply assume that media is a product that we consume, we need to appreciate that today’s media is highly customized and bears many fingerprints, including increasingly, our own. If we understand how the media we work from is built, we are in a better position to critique the slurry of information that is hurtling toward us. Never before has it been so imperative that we find the meaning from the noise of data and that demands a whole set of analytical skills we aren’t teaching in schools and never considered needing to bring to The New York Times.

I don’t want to suggest that such a turn in thinking—resisting fast for correct, thoughtfulness above information gathering—is easy. Big news agencies and citizens alike fall victim to lazy consumption in a world where information is cheap and fast. As the Globe & Mail’s slip-up this morning reveals, legacy news organizations as well as the rest of us have to resist the temptation to be faster and to ‘break’ news. Unfortunately, what they end up ‘breaking’ is the process of journalism itself.