Nine News boss: if Twitter fools highly trained pros like us, God help the public
Dr Mumbo has to admire the pluck of Nine News boss Mark Calvert for tackling the subject of the network’s premature announcement of actor Jeff Goldblum’s death.
He tells Telstra’s Now We Are Talking:
“None of us are perfect. And we were one of the networks that were caught up in what turned out to be an internet hoax on the morning that Michael Jackson died when the news went around that Jeff Goldblum the actor had also died. And because everyone was on air live – and I include Nine in this – we gave credibility to some of those reports.”
Which is sort of true. Although he did perhaps accidentally use the words “one of the networks” when he meant to use the words “the network”.
But the best bit is what it all goes to show:
“And that’s just one illustration of the Internet and how its mass of content can catch even professionals out so. God help less well trained and less cautious consumers of this stuff. Because there’s stuff out there that just ain’t true and it makes life tougher for everyone.”
God help us indeed. He is, of course, right. If even Richard Wilkins could have been fooled by the sophisitcated conspiracy (He read about it on Twitter, followed a link to a fake website, and from that told viewers: “New Zealand Police are saying that is a correct story,”) then it could so easily happen to any one of us.
Earlier in the conversation, Calvert mentions those “who are able to pump out what looks on the face of it like news content without any great filter or the normal journalistic checks and balances”. This, he suggests, is the province of “the maverick parties out there with some of the more crazy takes on news stories. The blogs, the conspiracy theorists.” Not Richard Wilkins, of course.
Calvert adds: “That’s making the whole landscape much more interesting and much more challenging for us. But also much more interesting and challenging for online users who are probably finding it increasingly difficult to differentiate between what’s true, what’s not, what’s fact, what’s fiction.”
He concludes: “Very quickly we were able to check and dismiss the death of Jeff Goldblum but not before the reporting of his death had become an internet phenomenon.”
Perhaps this is the internet phenomenon he’s talking about:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Jeff Goldblum Will Be Missed | ||||
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topics
death
hoax
Internet
Jeff Goldblum
Mark Calvert
News
Nine Network
Nine News
Now We Are Talking
Richard Wilkins
Telstra
TV
Twitter
Funnily enough, it was one the guys from my gaming forum in the UK who started the whole Jeff Goldblum rumour to try and wind up two of his mates!
The story is here:
http://www.johnskelton.blogspot.com/
Complete lack of journalistic fact-checking by the Wilkins team to see if it was true. As a former journalist the one thing that was drilled into our heads was that a story would never run unless you had at least double-checked the facts from good sources.
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Your media are in a seriously bad way over there aren’t they? A sort of Continued Denial of Reality Attack…
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Chk Chk Boom girl…Jeff Goldblum…yes, the media here are in a bad way. But then again, you’re dealing with a country with just 22 million people, localised population, a very fractured regional media dominating the airways, so its hardly surprising that the news services in Australia are infiltrated by poor standards and half-arsed attempts at journalism…
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Forgive me, for I am not a Super Smart Professional Media Guy® but just a lowly 40-something engineer & working stiff… but Wilkens is a knob – and Calvert even more of one for making excuses for him.
That “Fake-A-Wish” site has generated several identical fake death stories over the past few years. All the details have been the same, just the names get changed. A few years ago it was Tom Hanks; last year it was Tom Cruise. To any normal user who’s been around on the Internet for a few years, the site doesn’t even look especially real.
I was at home sick when the Today Show first “broke” this “news,” and it had already been debunked on Twitter for a good few hours. What kind of “highly trained professional journalist” depends on hours-old Twitter rumors and dodgy-looking websites for their “breaking news”?
Calvert would have done best to laugh it off as a “Well, weren’t *we* stupid” moment rather than try to over-analyze & justify it. Ah well. Perhaps on 25 June 2010 we’ll have a 1-year memorial: Vale MSM/TodayShow Credibility. Fell to its death from a cliff in New Zealand a year ago today.
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The difference between the “professionals” and less trained/less cautious consumer is that the latter isn’t constantly looking to be the “1st” to break stories, the first to be on the spot etc etc ad nauseum. I guess 9 can also lay claim to being the first to break a BS story it read on twitter – can see a funny and entertaining spoof in there somewhere.
It is that chase for one-upmanship that got both 9 and 7 in the predicament of reporting falsities. Fortunately the general news consumer has the brains to check more than one source – a skill it seems commercial t.v. journo’s have left to the wayside.
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Thanks for your comment, Alexander.
Although when a man who work in PR in Dubai starts showing sympathy for the state of the media down under, it’s a sad day for Australia’s fourth estate…
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
It’s not really sympathy, Doktor. It’s more sort of sitting over here watching your media car crash with that sense of slightly sick, guilty fascination that you get when you see car crashes.
I’m sure it’ll come to us in the Middle East, but at least we’ve got your excellent example to follow now!
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I’ll be calling on all my academic training when I respond to this: what absolute crap.
Seriously, if the world has changed so much that the idiots you employ, such as Wilkins, can barely keep up with whether or not there actually are talking cats out there desperate for Cheeseburgers, it’s time to take a good hard look at your staff.
Furthermore, if your staff are so incompetent, then a large portion of the blame rests on you, Calvert. Hell, you can’t move through Twitter or the internet these days without tripping over some idiot trying to sell overpriced “Web 2.0” or “SocNet” training, but surely you could spare some cash to teach Nine employees how to understand that researching a story may have changed since the early 1990’s.
One last thing, I could handle Nine defending this more if a qualified and usually talented journo had made the mistake, but this is Richard Wilkins. This is the man who reported that Sydney had lost the Olympics back in 2000. On April Fools. Based on what he’d heard on Triple J.
I’ll await Wilkins’ next hard hitting report on Bonzi Kittens.
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nine is so fail – telstra are probably the only people willing to listen to their pathetic excuses.
stfu nine – go die with some dignity.
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Richard Wilkins – proffessional. Ha ha this is so much funnier than the Colbert Vid.
Cant wait for Nines next promo, 1st to break the news that not all twitter reports are real. Oh and the ACA follow up, “could your teenagers be reading too many fake tweets resulting in their obesity, and could this lebanese builder who runs from our cameras be behind it”
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