Information distribution is a tricky business. Each fact needs to be checked and re-checked, each source needs to be confirmed. A respected news agency maintains its credibility by providing only stories that have been verified and are 100 percent accurate. This unspoken commitment engenders trust between reader and author, audience and publisher.    
At least that’s how it was supposed to be. 
Back in the late 19th century, “yellow journalism” had taken over the news industry. Two dominant papers monopolized the market: The New York World and the New York Journal. Competition between the two giants was stiff, and to increase readership they began creating sensational stories with colorful spreads and blaring headlines. The founding principle of yellow journalism was to sell, sell, sell, and it didn’t matter if the stories were real, based on facts or completely fictional. If they could shock and inspire working-class America to cough up its hard-earned cash, they got published.
Thankfully, this sort of gossip has since been abandoned to the checkout aisle at the local supermarket. But the role of the media over the years has begun to slowly change again, turning from a system created to inform to a structure designed to inundate. Accuracy has given way to dramatization; research has given way to rapidity. It’s no longer about getting the best and most detailed work out there; it’s about volume and quantity. Invariably, this media sensationalism leads to fear and confusion among the uninformed public audience.
In 2009, we were subjected to an incredible amount of media hype pertaining to the swine flu “pandemic.” A new and supposedly virulent strain of flu was sweeping across Asia, infecting everything in its path. A few smattered cases appeared in the United States, and the media rolled into action. Headlines predicted death and destruction, and the public was swept up in a panic. We don’t have enough vaccines! How are we going to prevent cross-contamination? Of course, the entire thing turned out to be a colossal waste of time.
While a World Health Organization advisory panel estimates that as many as 63 million Americans were actually infected by the virus, the actual number of deaths floats around 18,000 worldwide. To put that figure in perspective, regular influenza and cardiac arrest claim roughly 36,000 and 300,000 American lives per year, respectively. Clearly, too much publicity was given to this particular infectious disease.
Another problem with today’s media strategy is the ability to go viral. While this may seem fairly harmless when you’re giggling over the latest College Humor video, viral media has its negative points, too. Bloomberg, a respected financial news source, mistakenly ran an obituary for Apple mogul Steve Jobs in August 2008. Apparently it was merely updating a pre-existing obituary file, and someone accidentally hit the publish button. The “interwebs” lit up as people tried to find out more. The story was quickly pulled and an apology immediately posted explaining the mix-up, but not before the misinformation was picked up by many major news sites.
This is just one example of someone saying something that’s then misquoted by a second person, and before you know it there’s a Facebook group and a Wikipedia page, and people are perpetuating the rapidly spreading misinformation in a bizarre and confused game of Internet telephone.
Knowing something before anyone else has become more important than capturing the truth. The ability to spread information like wildfire through media such as Twitter and harvest it with tools such as terminology extraction software has corrupted the purity of thorough information gathering. These tools are being seen as pools of instant knowledge; places where you can get the latest on the lives of athletes and other celebrity gossip, the weather and even political updates. The American public is, as a whole, obsessed with other people’s lives and has a childlike faith in those who share that information. In an age when instant communication is commonplace and the public thirsts for information at an insatiable rate, the hysteria created by media hype and need for that “big scoop” provides a flashback to the deplorable days of yellow journalism.
For some reason, if a story appears online or in a newspaper, we still trust it. We rely on that old-fashioned and dying belief that if it appears in print, it is factual and research has been put into it, even though that style of journalism is slowly drying up and becoming outdated. As consumers, we need to become more suspicious of what we see and hear through today’s media.
[email protected]