Trust & the media

Two recent news stories, both driven by somewhat non-traditional actors have been big news recently, the Shirley Sherrod debacle and the WikiLeaks documents. For a review of the Sherrod story see this report from PEJ, for an overview of the WikiLeaks documents see this article from Wikipedia.

What is the more traditional media’s relationship to these kinds of sources? The stories played out quite differently. In the case of Sherrod, virtually no fact checking (such as asking Sherrod about it) was done before the story jumped from blogs to cable TV and beyond. With the Wikileaks documents three newspapers combed through them for about 3 weeks before they ran the story, with the New York Times asking the White House for comment before it ran.

Obviously the source material was different, a video has an appearance of authenticity that thousands of documents do not. The video also came with a pre-packaged headline that seemed relatively easy to accept (even for Sherrod’s bosses who pressed for her resignation). The document leak was advertised as potential evidence of war crimes, but that wasn’t something traditional media were ready to embrace, which was appropriate and should have applied to the Sherrod video as well. Right wing bloggers like the source of the Sherrod video are certainly more familiar to journalists as sources than a transparency activist organization like WikiLeaks, although that is not a good reason to accept and print what they say.