Two stories in the same day that are indicative of one of the biggest problems of mainstream journalism: creating the story instead of reporting the story.
First we have the Las Vegas CBS affiliate, KLAS Channel 8, adding a soundtrack to silent surveillance camera footage to juice-up the story.
According to a Las Vegas CityLife story, in the fall of 2000 surveillance cameras in Harrah’s recorded two alleged coin thieves resisting detainment by casino security guards and one of the suspects appearing to draw and fire a gun. One of the security guards was injured and a casino guest was killed.
The surveillance camera footage did not have an audio track, but when KLAS broadcast it during its 11:00 PM newscast on 13 February, muffled laughter, clanging slot machines, and two gunshots could all be heard accompanying the video footage. KLAS had modified the footage by dubbing a contrived soundtrack onto it. Perhaps even worse, the broadcaster failed to disclose that it had added the soundtrack.
Las Vegas CityLife quoted Mary Hausch, a media ethics teacher at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas: “What [KLAS] did goes completely against the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics. A basic [tenet] of television news is that if it’s not happening, don’t make it happen. I think adding sound [to footage] definitely falls into that category.
Next we have the Associated Press distorting a story so badly that the story’s subject, Google, felt compelled to reach out to two popular webloggers to set the record straight.
Google has, for more than a little while, offered advertisers sponsored links; a way to attach text ads to targeted search results. All reports indicate that there have been few complaints about these sponsored links. Google recently updated the service, mainly to improve the relevancy of the sponsored links.
The Associated Press, in a story that got picked up widely, reported that Google had transformed into just another pay-for-play search engine. Unfortunately the reportage was factually incorrect. None of the mainstream media outlets got the story correct, allowing the AP story to snowball, careening ignorantly down the wire.
In an interesting twist, Cindy McCaffrey, Google’s vice president of corporate marketing, didn’t even bother going to the usual mainstream suspects to try to set the record straight. Instead, McCaffrey went to Dave Winer and Doc Searls, two of the most widely-read webloggers on the net. Doc Searls disclosed part of the email in his Linux Journal piece on the matter:
“All we’ve done is modify our AdWords self-service program so that advertisers can pay on a CPC basis (this is good news). The search results continue to be as unbiased and objective as ever. We do not allow advertisers to influence rankings in any way through payment.”
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