Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 4th Oct 2008 21:12 UTC
If you're looking for a party, Wall Street probably isn't the place you're going to find one. And to make matters worse, there are apparently people out there who are wilfully trying to make the life of the people on Wall Street (and subsequently, the rest of the world) even harder. By making up fake stories. And publish them on CNN's Digg - iReport.com. Some individual had posted a fake report last Friday, claiming Steve Jobs had suffered from a heart attack and was rushed into the hospital. As a result, Apple's stock made a 10% nosedive.
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Member since:
2005-08-19
The primary responsibility of any news organization is to present the facts of the situation in a way that is (a) independently verifiable and (b) leaves consumers with an accurate understanding of the situation.
By this standard, major news networks publish crap everyday, and some do little else. News producers and consumers really don't care about the facts so much as the slant. It's way too motivated by personal agenda: news producers often create stories based on fluff to satisfy personal grudges or delusions, and news consumers accept/reject reporting for similar reasons. Reality comes in second. And ethics? Heh, sure.
News consumers are just as bad. Often they'll take something at face value just because their favorite news organization stated it as fact. Nevermind the other major news organizations are simultaneously exposing it as lies, or discounting it based on nonexistent reports by untrustworthy sources.
News consumers don't care about transparency. They don't want to verify anything they read. What they want, is information that tells them what they want to hear -- usually one of two things: (a) their agenda is advancing because it is good, smart, modern, whatever; or (b) their agenda is being blocked because their enemies are bad, ignorant, outdated, whatever. As long as they can find some news organization that gives the right slant, presto! the desired slant becomes fact.
In short, the problem is that news organizations publish what they want people to hear while news consumers select news organizations based on what they want to hear. It doesn't really matter what side of the issue you happen to be on (if any).
And yes, there are honest people in the world...I'm generalizing.
Ever watched cable news? The entire thing is a work-in-progress, with corrections slipping through the cracks because the next big partially-understood story has broken. Anonymous sources are also quite common.