by Ryan Holiday
Senator Eugene McCarthy once compared the journalists covering his 1968 presidential campaign to birds on a telephone wire. When one got up to fly to a different wire, they’d all follow. When another flew back, the rest would too. Today this metaphor needs an update. The birds still follow one another’s leads just as eagerly—but the wire need not always exist. They can be and often are perched on illusions, just as blogs were when they repeated Maurice Jarre’s manufactured remarks.
THE LINK ILLUSION
In the link economy, the blue stamp of an html link seems like it will support weight. (As had the links to the Guardian story containing the false quote.) If I write in an article that “Thomas Jefferson, by his own remarks, admitted to committing acts considered felonious in the State of Virginia,” you’d want to see some evidence before you were convinced. Now imagine that I added a link to the words “acts considered felonious.” This link could go to anything—it could go to a dictionary definition of “felonious acts,” or it could go to a pdf of the entire penal code for the state of Virginia, or it could just go to a gif that when you click it says, “Ha! You shouldn’t have trusted me!” But by linking to something, I have vaguely complied with the standards of the link economy. I have rested my authority on a source and linked to it, and now the burden is on the reader to disprove the validity of that link. Bloggers know this and abuse it.
Blogs have long traded on the principle that links imply credibility. Even Google exploits this perception. The search engine, founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were Stanford students, copies a standard practice from academia in which the number of citations a scientific paper gets is an indicator of how influential or important it is. But academic papers are reviewed by peers and editorial boards—shaky citations are hard to get away with.
Online links look like citations but rarely are. Through flimsy attribution, blogs are able to assert wildly fantastic claims that will spread well and drive comments. Some might be afraid to make something up outright, so the justification of “I wasn’t the first person to say this” is very appealing. It’s a way of putting the burden all on the other guy, or on the reader.
People consume content online by scanning and skimming. To use the bird metaphor again, they are what William Zinsser called “impatient bird[s], perched on the thin edge of distraction.” Only 44 percent of users on Google News click through to read the actual article. Meaning: Nobody clicks links, even interesting ones. Or if they do, they’re not exactly rigorous in poring over the article to make sure it proves the point in the last article they read.
There was a great April Fool’s prank a few years ago where NPR created an article headlined, why doesn’t america read anymore? The article looked like it would be a complaint about the decline in reading and critical thinking skills, and so it immediately went viral—shared on Facebook thousands of times. Except if you actually clicked the article, you’d find that what it actually said was:
We sometimes get the sense that some people are commenting on NPR stories that they haven’t actually read. If you are reading this, please like this post and do not comment on it. Then let’s see what people have to say about this “story.”
Countless people fell for that—because they don’t actually click links. They just assume they know what’s behind them, and often they assume the links confirm whatever they want them to confirm.
If readers give sites just seconds for their headlines, how much effort will they expend weighing whether a blog post meets the burden of proof? The number of posts we read conscientiously, like some amateur copy editor and fact-checker rolled into one, are far outpaced by the number of articles we just assume are reliable. And the material from one site quickly makes its way to others. Scandalous statements get traction wider and faster—and their dubious nature is more likely to be obscured by the link economy when it’s moving at viral speed. Who knows how many times you and I have passed over spurious assertions made to look legitimate through a bright little link?
THE BREAKING NEWS EXCUSE
One of the ways that journalists justify their laziness today is by claiming that breaking news deserves special exemptions from their normal obligations to, you know, actually be right and pass along correct information. That during a mass shooting, a fast-moving election night, some unexpected controversy, there isn’t time to do real reporting and so it’s better to just pass along the information they have to readers and viewers as it comes in. There are a lot of words they use to describe this technique: iterative journalism, process journalism, beta journalism. Whatever name you use, it’s stupid and dangerous.* It calls for bloggers to publish first and then verify what they wrote after they’ve posted it. Publishers actually believe that their writers need to do every part of the news-making process, from discovery to fact-checking to writing and editing in real time. It should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for two seconds why that is a bad thing—but they buy the lie that iterative journalism improves the news.
Erik Wemple, a blogger for the Washington Post, writes: “The imperative is to pounce on news when it happens and, in this case, before it happens. To wait for another source is to set the table for someone who’s going to steal your search traffic.”3 So by the time I’ve woken up in the morning, too much misinformation has been spread around the web to possibly be cleaned up. The “incentives are lined up this way,” Tommy Craggs would say while he was at Dead-spin, and we just needed to get used to it.
Seeking Alpha practiced it perfectly on one recent story: “If the newspaper is correct, and I have no way of verifying it, then this stock is in big trouble.” Really? Can’t verify it? No way at all? At its best, iterative journalism is what TechCrunch does: rile up the crowd by repeating sensational allegations and then pretend that they are waiting for the facts to come in. They see no absurdity in publishing a post with the headline paypal shreds ostensibly rare violin because it cares and then opening the article with “Now a lot of this story isn’t out yet and I have a line in to Paypal [sic] about this, so before we get out the pitchforks lets [sic] discuss what happened.”4
Arthur Schopenhauer called newspapers “the second hand of history” but added that the hand was made of inferior metal and rarely working properly. He said that journalists were like little dogs: Something moves and they start barking. The problem is that what they’re often barking at is “no more than a shadow play on the wall.”
Iterative journalists, whether writing for a newspaper a few centuries ago or a blog today, follow blindly wherever the wisps of the speculation may take them, do the absolute minimum amount of research or corroboration, and then post this suspect information immediately, as it is known, in a continuous stream. As Jeff Jarvis put it: “Online, we often publish first and edit later. Newspaper people see their articles as finished products of their work. Bloggers see their posts as part of the process of learning.” Or as Gawker’s former “media reporter” said: “Gawker believes that publicly airing rumors out is usually the quickest way to get to the truth. . . . Let’s acknowledge that we can’t vouch for the veracity or truth of the rumors we’ll be sharing here—but maybe you can.” Jesus Christ.
This “learning process” is not some epistemological quest. Dropping the ruse, Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, put it more bluntly: “Getting it right is expensive, getting it first is cheap.”* And by extension, since it doesn’t cost him anything to be wrong, he presumably doesn’t bother trying to avoid it. It’s not just less costly; it makes more money, because every time a blog has to correct itself, it gets another post out of it—more pageviews.†
The iterative approach sells itself as flexible and informative, but much more realistically, it manifests in the forms of rumors, half-truths, shoddy reporting, overwhelming amounts of needless information, and endless predictions and projections. Instead of using slow-to-respond official sources or documents, it leans on rumors, buzz, and questions. Events are “liveblogged” instead of fi
ltered. Bloggers post constantly, depending on others to point out errors or send in updates, or for sources to contact them.
Iterative journalism is defined by its jumpiness. It is as jumpy as reporters can get without outright making things up. Only the slightest twitch is needed for a journalist to get a story live. As a result, stories claiming massive implications, like takeover talks, lawsuits, potential legislation, pending announcements, and criminal allegations, are often posted despite having minuscule origins. A tweet, a comment on a blog, or an e-mail tip might be enough to do the trick. Bloggers don’t fabricate news, but they do suspend their disbelief, common sense, and responsibility in order to get to big stories first. The pressure to “get something up” is inherently at odds with the desire to “get things right.”
A blog practicing iterative journalism would report they are hearing that Google is planning to buy Twitter or Yelp, or break the news of reports that the president has been assassinated (all falsely reported online many times now). The blog would publish the story as it investigates these facts—that is, publish the rumor first while they see if there is anything more to the story. Hypothetically, a media manipulator for Yelp would be behind the leak, knowing that getting the rumors of the acquisition out there could help them jack up the price in negotiations. I personally wouldn’t kick off reports about the president’s death, because I wouldn’t get anything from it, but plenty of pranksters would.
If a blog is lucky, the gamble it took on a sketchy iterative tip will be confirmed later by events. If it’s unlucky—and this is the real insidious part—the site simply continues to report on the reaction to the news, as though they had nothing to do with creating it. This is what happened to Business Insider when they wrongly made the shocking claim that New York governor David Paterson would resign. The end of the headline was simply updated: “NYT’s Big David Paterson Bombshell Will Break Monday, Governor’s Resignation to Follow” became “NYT’s Big David Paterson Bombshell Will Break Monday, Governor’s Office Denies Resignation in Works” [emphasis mine].5
They should have learned their lesson months earlier, after falling for a similar hoax. A prankster posted on CNN’s online iReport platform that a “source” had told them that Steve Jobs had had a severe heart attack.* It was the user’s first and only post. It was
Business Insider rewrote the lead with a new angle: “ ‘Citizen journalism’ . . . just failed its first significant test.”6 Yeah, that’s who failed here. You know who didn’t? Those who were shorting Apple stock.
And what are the consequences for blowing it this poorly? There are none. “All that can happen,” the famous (and reckless) gossip columnist Walter Winchell once said about one of his breaking scoops, “if it is wrong is that I gooft again.” But hey, at least he was willing to own even that.
Today, as a way of avoiding ever being embarrassingly off base, blogs couch their claims in qualifiers: “We’re hearing . . .”; “I wonder . . .”; “Possibly . . .”; “Lots of buzz that . . .”; “Chatter indicates that . . .”; “Sites are reporting . . .”; “Might . . .”; “Maybe . . .”; “Could . . . , Would . . . , Should . . .”; and so on. In other words, they toss the news narrative into the stream without taking full ownership and pretend to be an impartial observer of a process they began.
For example, these are the first two sentences of New York magazine’s Daily Intel blog post about David Paterson, the former governor of New York:
After weeks of escalating buzz about a New York Times piece that would reveal a “bombshell” scandal about New York Governor David Paterson, Business Insider is reporting that the story will likely come out tomorrow and will be followed by the governor’s resignation (!!). Though the nature of the revelation is still a mystery, reports are that this story is “much worse” than Paterson’s publicly acknowledged affair with a state employee [emphases mine].7
Welcome to Covering Your Ass 101. Nearly every claim is tempered by what might happen or attributed to someone else. Nearly every claim attributed to someone else links to some other site. But what does the writer actually think? What are they willing to own based on their personal reporting and knowledge? Not much. They want to say all they can and nothing at the same time—the height of disingenuous hedging. Which worked out great for Daily Intel, since the story turned out to be totally wrong. Not that anyone learned from the mistake—the posts were just updated with more speculation and guessing. One mistake is replaced by more mistakes.
“There is nothing more shocking than to see assertion and approval dashing ahead of cognition and perception,” Cicero said a long time ago (or maybe I just made it up—are you going to check?). But that’s how it works online . . . on purpose. As they say, it’s not a bug—it’s a feature.
A BROKEN PHILOSOPHY
May becomes is becomes has, I tell my clients. That is, on the first site the fact that you “may” be doing something becomes the fact that you “are” doing something by the time it has made the rounds. The next time they mention your name, they look back and add the past tense to their last assertion, whether or not it actually happened. This is recursion at work, officially sanctioned and very possible under the rules of the link economy.
Under these circumstances it is far too easy for mistakes to pile on top of mistakes or for real reporting to be built on lies and manipulations—for analysis to be built on a foundation of weak support. It becomes so easy, as one reporter has put it, for things to become an amalgam of an amalgam.
The link economy encourages bloggers to repeat what “other people are saying” and link to it instead of doing their own reporting and standing behind it. This changes the news from what has happened into what someone said the news is. Needless to say, these are not close to the same thing.
One of my favorite books is Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. Though media mistakes are not the subject of the book, Schulz does do a good job of explaining why the media so regularly gets it wrong. Scientists, she says, replicate each other’s experiments in order to prove or disprove their findings. Conversely, journalists replicate one another’s conclusions and build on them—often when they are not correct.
The news has always been riddled with errors, because it is self-referential instead of self-critical. Mistakes don’t occur as isolated incidents but ripple through the news, sometimes with painful consequences. Because blogs and the media have become so interdependent and linked, a lapse of judgment or poor analysis in one place affects many places.
Science essentially pits the scientists against each other, each looking to disprove the work of others. This process strips out falsehoods, mistakes, and errors. Journalism has no such culture. Reporters look to one-up each other on the same subjects, often adding new scoops to existing stories.
Meanwhile, people like Jeff Jarvis explicitly advise online newspapers and aspiring blogs not to waste their time trying “to replicate the work of other reporters.” In the age of the link, he says, “this is clearly inefficient and unnecessary.” Don’t waste “now-precious resources matching competitors’ stories” or checking and verifying them like a scientist would. Instead, pick up where they left off and see where the story takes you. Don’t be a perfectionist, he’s saying; join the link economy and delegate trust.
When I hear people preach about interconnectedness and interdependence—like one reporter who suggested he and his colleagues begin using the tag NR (neutral retweet) to preface the retweets on Twitter that they were posting but not endorsing—I can’t help but think of the subprime mortgage crisis. I think about one bank that hands off subprime loans to another, which in turn packages them and hands them to another still. Why are you retweeting things you don’t believe in?! I think about the rating agencies whose job was to monitor the subprime transactions but were simply too busy, too overwhelmed, and too conflicted to bother doing it. I think of falling dominoes. I wonder why we would do that to ourselves again—multiplied many times ove
r in digital.
Of course replication is expensive. But it is a known cost, one that should be paid up front by the people who intend to profit from the news. It is a protection and a deterrent all at once. The unknown cost comes from failure—of banks or of trust or of sources—and it is borne by everyone, not just the businesses themselves.
When Jarvis and others breathlessly advocate for new concepts they do not understand, it is both comical and dangerous. The web gurus try to tell us that this distributed, crowdsourced version of fact-checking and research is more accurate, because it involves more people. But I side with Descartes and have more faith in a scientific approach, in which every man is responsible for his own work—in which everyone is questioning the work of everyone else, and this motivates them to be extra careful and honest.
The old media system was a long way from perfect, but their costly business model at least tried to find independent confirmation where possible. It advocated editorial independence instead of risky interdependence. It was expensive, sure, and definitely unsexy, but it was a step above the pseudo-science of the link economy. It was certainly better than what we have online, where blogs do nothing but report what “[some other blog] is reporting,” where blogs pass along unverified information using the excuse “but I linked to where I stole it from.”
To simply know where something came from, or just the fact that it came from somewhere else, does not alleviate the problems of the delegation of trust. In fact, this is the insidious part of the link economy. It creates the appearance of a solution without solving anything. Some other blog talked to a source (don’t believe them? here’s the link) so now they don’t have to. That isn’t enough for me. We deserve better.
* Even more absurd, the “public report” was actually just a comment by an on-air contributor to Fox News with no foreign policy background, who was later pulled because of it.
