Spin Wars

Two instances of media spin hit me simultaneously yesterday.

1. My mother-in-law forwarded a vicious slander of Barack Obama that had been forwarded to her. The message tried to paint Obama as a closeted radical Muslim. I suppose it doesn't help that his middle name is "Hussein," which might as well be "Jones" in the Middle East but most American's only hear it as "evil guy." A quick check on snopes.com easily verified the truth: he's been active in a Christian church for the last twenty-five years and never said or did anything to indicate he ever considered himself a Muslim.
2. The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed from Paul A. Offit, citing a JAMA study that asserted that people who abstained from certain immunizations were putting their communities at much greater risk for certain diseases. I haven't been able to read the full text of the study to decide how much credence to give to it, but I found it rather irresponsible that neither Offit nor the Wall Street Journal disclosed his ties to the pharmaceutical industry -- that he is a consultant to Merck on the production of vaccines, that he has refused to disclose whether he is paid by Merck, and has a financial stake in the production of vaccines in the form of his patents. Of course, I didn't know this off the top of my head -- this basic information was available courtesy of a single Google search.

These two incidents show the acceleration of both knowledge and ignorance in the information age. The basest lies can shoot around the world in days . . . but individuals can validate that information just as easily, too. I am not so much concerned that individuals and media are generating spin; that has always been true and always will be true. What concerns me more is the fact that we are all becoming little publishers ourselves -- our capacity to send information or misinformation has become magnified. Journalists have an accepted standard for fact-checking, validation, and full-disclosure . . . but those standards have not disseminated to the broader culture.

I know journalists are often slamming the blogosphere for playing fast and loose with standards of reporting, but I am not just echoing the "you're not journalists so just shut up and listen to us" argument. I don't believe that a blogger, or even a person who innocently forwards an email to their friends, has to meet the same journalistic standards as CNN. But I wish the popular culture recognized that they ought to have some standard . . . and hold them responsible for it.