Can We Trust The Internet? Winnowing Out Misleading, Untrue Sites

“I think it comes down to whether we can trust the internet to winnow good from bad in the blogosphere,” Trina commented on my post Coming Out From Behind the Byline: One Journalist’s Take On New Media.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about this idea of winnowing: weeding out those websites and blogs with URLs that aren’t worth typing. The internet has provided me with countless examples of where good sites can go wrong.

A citizen journalist using just a video camera uncovered reporters censoring former presidential candidate Ron Paul at a gathering of GOP candidates for president on Mackinac Island, MI about 19 months ago, reported columnist Tim Skubick for the Leelanau News. Or that’s what they thought.

Courtesy | Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures.net

“I don’t want these Ron Paul people, but I need shots of audience people eating and crap like that for voice over,” the producer says in the roughly 60 second video, which Mr. Skubick says garnered 65,000 hits in its first week in youtube.com. (The original video seems to be unavailable, but see another posting by searching “Censoring Ron Paul support?” on youtube.com.)

Unfortunately, Skubick reported, the citizen journalist didn’t check the facts. After shooting a ten-minute segment with Ron Paul, “the goal was to get some generic video of what was going on inside. To make sure the video was not slanted to favor one candidate or the other,” the producer asked them to avoid filming more Paul supporters.

But one posting and a flood of vicious emails later, the reporters stand accused of censorship, a cardinal sin in journalism. “No one called; no one suspended his or her judgment to get at the truth,” writes Skubick.

That’s not the only way that new internet sources are straying from the straight and narrow path that journalists follow in reporting the news.

Six minutes before medical examiners pronounced Michael Jackson dead, an IM feed reported the King of Pop’s demise. Events shortly after proved this report true, but internet outlets that passed along this news even an hour afterward were in the wrong.

Old Media outlets like CNN and MSNBC took several hours to confirm and report this historic event. Why, you ask?

“Someone may have been calling the hospital, the family, Tito Jackson, Jesse Jackson, not only for confirmation but for a voucher that the next of kin had all been adequately notified,” said Scott M. Fulton, III, on Betanews, where he blasted these new media sources. “You remember journalism, don't you? Or is that too much ‘old media?’”

Let’s be clear: bloggers, youtube.com posters, and other internet content producers are not all journalists. Some are simply people with a computer, internet, and desire to share their opinion. But the internet gives them the same platform as the rest of us.

So how do we winnow out the good sites from the bad? For now, the truth is that we can only control the content on our own websites. There is no ranking system where we can decry the distributors of false or misleading content.

I’m curious though, about search engine optimization. I won’t pretend to completely understand SEO, a complicated phrase that simply means “how I get my content to the top of a google search,” but I understand that this calculation does depend in part on linking.

By not linking to questionable content providers, can we keep a website low in search results, thereby reducing the number of people who click through to their site?

I’m not naïve enough to believe that one person alone can change a site’s placement in search rankings or even that a collective effort can change the ranking of some of the most popular sites, but maybe together we can begin to winnow out the worst of the worst.