Last week, like most weeks, I found myself thinking hard about the United States. In particular I found myself thinking about the tide of anti-Americanism sweeping the world after President George W Bush’s decision to stabilise the Middle East by colonising it.
It seems to me this whole distrust of the US business could be cleared up at a stroke. All the rest of the world has to do is accept one simple truth; that the US is better than everyone else. At absolutely everything.
It’s better at fighting wars (better certainly than the Iraqis), it’s better at making films (Bollywood may have come on in leaps and bounds but American Pie is still a good 10% better than Dude, Where’s My Cow) and, of course, it’s much, much better at creating exciting new combinations of sugar and fat to sell to children.
But there’s one area above all of these in which the US leads the world and that’s in the creation and reporting of political scandals.
Two weeks ago US presidential hopeful John Kerry was accused of having an affair with one of his interns by the right-wing Internet gossipmonger Matt Drudge (drudgereport.com). Despite the fact that the accusations were almost certainly untrue, they were reported in the print media on both sides of Atlantic, attributed either to Drudge himself or to “Internet rumours”.
What stinks about the whole affair is not the glee with which Drudge refuses to let the facts get in the way of a good lie, but that most of those lies (including, apparently, this most recent one) are supplied to him by print journalists who don’t have enough evidence to put them into their own pages.
Thanks to people like Drudge, the Internet is turning into a gigantic gossip-laundering operation for cowardly print hacks. Heard a juicy rumour about a presidential candidate? Know it’s probably total rubbish but want to print it anyway? No problem! Just leak it to Drudge, wait for him to print it and then run it in your own pages as an “Internet rumour”. Job done.
And it’s not only in the US. Just look at Britain’s Popbitch; the once-readable gossip e-letter was created solely as a vehicle to release stories that the editors (mainstream music journalists themselves) and their friends couldn’t print in their magazines. Those same journalists now regularly repeat the rumours in print, credited to Popbitch. Now of course there’s no real harm in music journalists unaccountably bitching about pop stars — how else would we know which Spice Girl wet the bed until she was 15? — but there is something very harmful about Web publications turning into clearing houses for scurrilous political gossip, especially in an election year.
Every time we allow print journalists to hijack our medium for their own evil ends, we blow the reputation of Web-only news reporting to pieces, creating a whole new army of readers who trust the Web to bring them gossip and lies but don’t believe a word we say the rest of the time.
We online publishers have enough trouble convincing readers that our words have as much value as those of our dead-tree cousins without Drudge et al acting as the print media’s lazy, lying journobitch. And pity the poor online hack who stumbles across a genuine scoop about a presidential candidate. Who’s going to believe him? Not me. And not you. And not anyone else.
Instead we’ll just wait until a journalist from a proper print newspaper copies the story, fact-checks it properly and prints it under their own byline. Only then will it become a “story” rather than an “Internet rumour”. It’s win-win for the print world, and lose-lose for us. Way to go, Matt.
So is there anything we can do to prevent Internet-based newsreporting from going the way of the supermarket tabloid? It’s a tough one but I think I might have an answer — and unsurprisingly it involves taking a big leaf out of our print colleagues’ books.
First of all, the non-Drudgey news sites of this world (and I include high-profile bloggers) have to learn to resist the temptation to repeat a juicy rumour without checking it, even if that means refusing to publish stories if they don’t stand up.
Second, we need to draw a much clearer distinction between proper news sites and e-gossip rags, in the way that print-based news magazines such as Newsweek have invested in quality journalism to distance themselves from the likes of the National Enquirer. This is far easier for the Web editions of print publications (Guardian Unlimited et cetera) than it is for Web-only publications, but a little bit of trusted-brand building goes a long way.
Finally, and most importantly, we need to be much, much more proactive in hunting down genuine scoops, even if that means tearing ourselves away from Google for two hours to hit the phones and pound the streets. Only then can we hope to undo the Drudge effect and allow online journalists to take their rightful place on the media landscape, competing head to head with the print media’s finest. Overambitious? That’s what they said about Dude, Where’s My Cow. — Â