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The New Media slacks off again By: Mark Morgan on 11/3/2000; 12:09 PM One interesting thing about cyberspace: it may be becoming easier to Internet-based Urban Legends to their source, since you can quickly hunt for connections, assuming all or most connections in the chain of myth are online. Fascinating read. It's a little ridiculous that no editor at Mr. Showbiz did any fact checking on the story, but it doesn't surprise me. (I've long given up any hope of actual journalism coming out of Drudge except by accident.) I've heard the excuse that Internet time provides no lead time for fact checking, and it doesn't impress me at all. I've never worked in the press, but can it be that difficult and time-consuming? (Maybe Brian Carnell has some insight on this.) The unfortunate reality is that experience shows that this extensive debunking by Ebert is likely to accomplish absolutely zero. For the rest of time, The Contender will be known as the movie Gary Oldman compared to Nazi propoganda. Which is a shame, as every review I've read says it's a great movie. +1 in the Game to Mr. Showbiz.
Re: The New Media slacks off again By: Brian Carnell on 11/3/2000; 1:03 PM >Fascinating read. It's a little ridiculous that no editor at Mr. Showbiz did any fact checking on the story, but it doesn't surprise me. (I've long given up any hope of actual journalism coming out of Drudge except by accident.) I've heard the excuse that Internet time provides no lead time for fact checking, and it doesn't impress me at all. I've never worked in the press, but can it be that difficult and time-consuming? (Maybe Brian Carnell (http://brian.carnell.com) has some insight on this.) Weird. I read the reports of Oldman slamming "The Contender" in numerous places. BTW, I thought the weirdest thing in the story was Ebert reporting Urbanski saying that Oldman received calls saying it would hurt his Oscar chances if he were identified as a conservative. This has nothing to do with Internet time IMO. Fact checking has always been fast and loose in the media. I mean you had CBS news in the 1980s running a story on a man with a perpetual motion machine as if it were possible. Look at how many people think Gore actually said he invented or created the Internet thanks to lousy reporting. The archetypal case for this is Stephen Glass. The New Republic had to fire him after it turned out that for *three years* he apparently simply invented the stories that he wrote for the magazine. One of main problems I see people make is they are too trusting. Sometimes it's not possible, but when it is I always like to go back to primary documents and/or find people corroborating the sort of eyewitness accounts in the case of something like the Oldman story (or Glassman who reported anecdotes that were simply too good to be true). People are too willing to read the Mr. Showbiz report and then never go back and look at the Premier story -- very bad methodology. One of the more embarassing examples of this was Rush Limbaugh and some other conservative writers who got burned by repeating some false claims about the ozone layer because the claims had been summarized and then repeated in areas they assumed were reliable. If they'd gone and sought out the primary documents, however, they would have noticed the claims originally saw print in a Lyndon Larouche rag and might have been a bit more skeptical.
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