Last week's "Safer Internet Day" was largely devoted to protecting children from the ravages out there online, but this year's theme - "Think B4 U Post" - is good advice for all of us. Even as eminent (but a mite too publicity-hungry) a philosopher as Bernard-Henri Lévy can fall for hoaxes, given his eagerness to pontificate.
Mother Jones ("Dr. Evil's Payday") reminded us that in the US, even the mainstream press is regularly hoodwinked by very private profiteers posing as nonprofit "public interest" groups.
Perhaps inspired by the need to warn people of the dangers of believing everything you see or read, Franco-German TV channel Arte carried a scary program, which you may still be able to see here. Scary because of the kinds of things that pass for "news" or "fact" on the web, such as a whole lot of 9/11 conspiracy stuff. Ludicrous as it is, many people apparently take it for gospel truth.
Meanwhile, a group of European journalists spent five days in a French farmhouse with Twitter and Facebook as their only source of information. Along with the "flotsam and jetsam" of the "pointless babble," they reported, they also got repeated huge does of American headlines and little else.
Which brings me to sourcing. Many years before I started blogging, before there was even something called the internet, I took a short course in "writing to order" at the Foreign Service Institute, and it was mostly about a core competency in diplomacy - reporting. Prior to email's informalization and instantization of diplomatic communication, diplomats had to draft "cables" or telegrams from the field, reporting on developments in bilateral relations, the internal political scene - anything that might impact on US interests.
Every year, the State Department judged cables according to criteria that bloggers would do well to keep in mind:
- Sourcing: Is this first hand observation, based on a discussion with someone in the know, or is it derived from newspaper reporting?
- Relevance: It may be beautifully written, but is it important?
- Accessible: It better have a clear summary up front - even better if the title summarizes the message.
Our group was shown examples of what, at first glance, might have seemed award-winners, but the prose often covered up serious shortcomings in sourcing. There was an awful lot of derivative stuff from newspapers, which came to be lumped in under "open sourcing." The prizewinners were those who had gone out into the field and observed for themselves.
Recently, I read the late, great Polish correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski's last book, Travels With Herodotus. Herodotus' Histories was Kapuscinski's travel companion for his years reporting on war and coups from Accra to Zanzibar, and Mr. K. considers him not just the first historian, but the first reporter:
But how could Herodotus, a Greek, know what the faraway Persians are saying? It was because he traveled to where they were, asked, observed, and collected information from what he himself saw and what others told him. His first act, therefore, was the journey. But is that not the case for all reporters?
Not all bloggers can hope to imitate Herodotus or Kapuscinksi, and even armchair generals have some good ideas. But consideration of the source is essential. It is still up to the reader of newspapers or blogs - as Whirled View's Patricia Lee Sharpe has shown - to separate the wheat from the chaff.