OLEAN -- Many aging journalists, say on the backside of 55 or so, express a cranky, nervous wait-and-see attitude when it comes to pronouncing the Computer Age a success, and its electronic stepchildren, the Internet and online publishing, a boon to all mankind.
Count me among the members of this dyspeptic and apprehensive crowd.
It's not just nostalgia for the romantic days of noisy newsrooms, or ink-stained wretches hammering out copy on clanky manual typewriters, or for newspaper dominance in the field of reliable communication -- although that is certainly a small part of it. It's mostly about lack of trust. Too much of what appears on your computer screen simply can't be trusted as accurate.
Oh, the research and writing aspects of communication are certainly improved -- no contest. I can't even compose on a typewriter anymore (or find one, for that matter). And you can do more research on a computer in 15 minutes than you could in a full day during the old ink-on-paper age of leafing through yellowed magazines, dusty books and myriad volumes of the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. Indeed, the Internet is critical to the success of this newspaper.
It's just that you have to be skeptical about much of what you read on your computer screen.
And I'm not just talking about bloggers, or spam, or instant messaging, or ubiquitous scams, or the complete corruption of the English language and accepted spellings, or the scores of other harmful progeny from this dicey and dubious invention. I'm referring to the almost casual disregard for the truth -- posing as reliable fact -- in many accepted corners of the Internet.
Take the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, for instance. My young college students love it and trust it -- probably because it is free, easy to use and egalitarian, reflecting the postings and rewrites and copy editing of about 13,000 anonymous "volunteer" writers who wish to add to a body of general "knowledge" that has grown to almost 900,000 articles in English and millions more in other languages, a site referenced by more than 16 million users per month. But it is also dangerous, unaccountable and ill-conceived.
Last May, some clueless fool posted an entry which described the nationally renowned journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. as someone "thought to have been directly involved" in the assassinations of both President John F. Kennedy (in 1963) and his younger brother Robert F. Kennedy (in 1968). The entry also claimed, falsely, that Seigenthaler lived in the Soviet Union for 13 years, ending in 1984.
This is uber-sliming at its nadir, and I know it to be false not from hearsay or written reference, but because Seigenthaler is a friend and respected mentor. Over the decades, he made his Nashville Tennessean one of the most respected and lauded newspapers in the nation.
I know he wasn't in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, because I saw him almost daily as we toiled at a common task. He was a founding editor of USA Today and its first editorial director. I was in the USA Today newsroom on loan from Gannett News Service, preparing the front-page Newsline index and writing stories.
I know he wasn't in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, because he was teaching me investigative journalism as a lecturer at the American Press Institute when it was housed in New York City and run out of quarters connected to Columbia University. He convinced me during that life-changing learning episode that I actually could be a good reporter.
John Seigenthaler, along with his colleague and friend John Quinn (now retired), were often referred to in the early days of Gannett's USA Today venture as the "conscience of the company." They were men of wisdom, courage, humor, judgment, accuracy, and above all -- truth.
You might be able to fool almost everybody else in your life, but under their tutelage, you could never fool the reader.
After helping USA Today to launch a successful and revolutionary national newspaper, Seigenthaler founded the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University. He also served as president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
To call this man an assassin of anyone, never mind of friends important in world history, is an indelible stain upon reason, upon history, and upon the sanctity of the printed word.
Contrary to Wikipedia claims that mistakes are corrected instinctively and almost immediately, the defamation of Seigenthaler being linked to the Kennedy assassinations remained in this electronic "reference book" for well over four months.
Seigenthaler became aware of it when his alarmed son, NBC on-air newsman John Seigenthaler Jr., brought it to his attention.
The huge libel was particularly galling to Seigenthaler -- now 78 -- and to those who knew him, because he was one of Bobby Kennedy's best friends.
Seigenthaler was a pallbearer at Bobby Kennedy's funeral. He was RFK's trusted administrative assistant in the Justice Department in the early 1960s when JFK appointed his brother attorney general. He was often the only other Justice Department employee in the room when RFK met with civil rights leaders.
Seigenthaler helped his boss advance the standard of civil rights in that crucial period -- personally taking part in the 1961 Freedom Rides in Alabama, during which he was injured and knocked unconscious trying to help another rider under physical assault.
When he read the Wikipedia "biography" of himself, it was "mind-boggling," he has stated.
The situation worsened. Two previously respected research sites -- Answers.com and Reference.com -- repeated the calumny by simply pasting the Wikipedia falsehood into their texts.
Seigenthaler tried to find out who was responsible for this malicious idiocy. He phoned Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales. Sorry, he was told by Wales, but there was no way under Wikipedia's anonymity rules that a provider of false information could be traced, or even identified.
Wales insisted that thousands of "volunteer editors" correct Wikipedia mistakes almost instantaneously, but Seigenthaler -- an award-winning investigative reporter in his youth -- began digging. He discovered only one correction had been made to his entry, a fix of a minor misspelled word incidental to the content. He also got Wales to admit he has only one paid employee.
Wikipedia finally removed the false and defamatory content in early October, as did Reference.com and Answers.com almost a month later.
Around Thanksgiving of last year, Seigenthaler -- as any good journalist would -- took to the opinion pages he used to oversee in USA Today, and wrote about his terrible experience. He recounted the discovery, through an Internet Protocol number, that the spurious information had been filed by a BellSouth Internet customer. That company was unhelpful. File a lawsuit, Seigenthaler was advised.
Further legal research, he wrote, showed that would not be fruitful. The public, and probably most lawyers and judges, are unaware that a buried time-bomb section of the misnamed 1996 Communications Decency Act -- wedged into it, no doubt, by big-spending lobbyists on Capitol Hill -- states that, unlike print or broadcast outlets, "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker." In English, that means online service providers -- like AOL, MCI, BellSouth, or Wikipedia, -- cannot, as Seigenthaler explained, be sued "for disseminating defamatory attacks on citizens posted by others."
This sets case law and the American way of justice on its ear. It basically means anyone can use the Internet anytime he or she wants to defame anyone else -- and get away with it. They don't even have to attempt a proof of truth or accuracy.
The Seigenthaler article produced quick reaction. A frequent online critic of Wikipedia, Daniel Brandt, finally tracked down the culprit writer of the assassination entry -- a 38-year-old delivery service manager in Nashville named Brian Chase. Chase apologized to Seigenthaler in writing, and explained he had intended the whole thing as a "joke" on a co-worker with whom he'd been discussing the well-known Seigenthaler family. He told USA Today he thought Wikipedia was "some sort of gag encyclopedia." Chase then resigned his delivery service job.
"I didn't think anyone would ever take it seriously," Chase wrote in his letter of apology.
Seigenthaler, a keen analyst of public reaction, predicted that Wikipedia would soon be hit with other hoaxes because of its virtually nonexistent fact-checking mechanisms. Bingo.
Within a few days, the bogus online encyclopedia was carrying news that its own founder, Jimmy Wales, had been shot to death during his dinner by Seigenthaler's infuriated and masked wife. The lie was outlandish, but even the London Times, among others, bit for this latest bit of cyberhoax information and repeated it. Talk about proving a point. A bombardment of fake and obviously untruthful postings followed from all sorts of hoaxers.
Wales quickly changed his rules to allow only registered users to post or revise an article, but still did nothing about making sure fact-checkers knew what they were about.
Other reactions to Seigenthaler's article were instructive of how tunnel-vision online advocates think these days. Cyberspace enthusiasts tended to defend Wikipedia's damaging loose standards -- never mind the outcome.
Matt McKenzie, writing on linuxpipeline.com, incredibly enough criticized Seigenthaler for using USA Today as a "soapbox" and for labeling Wikipedia a "flawed and irresponsible research tool" -- which it obviously is. He also accused Seigenthaler of "mindlessly spreading bad information" by criticizing Wikipedia. Huh? No one has proven Seigenthaler of any inaccuracy, even in his righteous indignation.
"Granted, some people probably stumbled across the fake Wikipedia article on Seigenthaler and swallowed it hook, line and sinker. So what?" blogged McKenzie shortly before Christmas. "Did Seigenthaler really know anyone who read the phony Wikipedia entry and accepted any of its false claims as true? It seems highly unlikely."
This is the kind of bogus reasoning that proves my point.
The answer is: Yes, of course they believed it. When I read the entry to a group of college students, several indicated by raised hands it might be true, or at least worth investigating. They didn't know John Seigenthaler from Siegfried and Roy, but it was on the Wikipedia site, so it must be so.
"The way some of the mainstream press gleefully went after Wikipedia, you'd think none of them had ever made a mistake," wrote Wendy M. Grossman for the theinquirer.net.
No, Wendy, that's just the point.
When a Janet Cooke, or a Jayson Blair, or a Jack Kelley prevaricates or fabricates, it's eventually much easier to track them down and fire them. Their name is on the falsehood, after all. When a faceless, nameless blogger or cybergeek writes a hideous and damaging lie -- maliciously or through nearly unbelievable stupidity -- it's almost impossible to track them down. And who knows what is the truth online anymore?
Misinformation is dangerous. It has brought down empires. But usually pre-cyberspace perpetrators were conscious enactors -- willing liars. Not so today. The Internet has made publishers of anyone who has fingers, but it strikes me as a bit like handing an armed nuclear device to Bugs Bunny.
The young folks I meet who are so entranced by the Internet and its purportedly accurate online information -- a good portion of its users, I'd venture -- do not seem to know much about history, nor do they seem to grasp or appreciate the importance of history, nor the consequences of spreading untruths. A glaring generalization, maybe, but one that current teachers almost universally grouse about. If pressed, I could produce a few students who are only dimly aware JFK and RFK were murdered in the first place. Why wouldn't they think Seigenthaler did it?
Seigenthaler himself predicted one likely outcome of all this indefensible idiocy -- which is likely to continue in spades once politicians figure out the potential of spreading the Big Lie on the Internet.
"My fear is that we're going to get government regulation of the Internet as a result," he told USA Today's Susan Page. As usual, he is right. And once that happens, a beautiful and democratizing experiment that has the potential to uplift all mankind will be scarred and probably rendered corrupt.
As for this old perfesser, I am taking one small reactive step immediately. In my senior thesis course, in which last-year students must cite and footnote every scrap of research information, I have announced I will no longer allow the use of Wikipedia as a reliable or usable source. In fact, I will deduct for it.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Jan. 24 2006 |