The reliability of unreliable online reporting

Here is an example of how blogs posing as news and bloggers posing as reporters undermine online journalism and why we will miss newspapers in the near future.

Greg Mitchell, a blogger at thenation.com, makes note of another blog which informs the world that it is Israel's official policy to keep Gaza on the brink of economic collapse and that the Israelis have kept the United States informed of this policy. The ostensible source for this information is a diplomatic cable given to Wikileaks.

Just another news story from Cablegate.

Well, not really.

If you wandered down the rabbit hole you'd find that Mitchell's link is just another blogger, Andrew Sullivan at theatlantic.com, yammering about Israel's treatment of Gaza in a post about the evils of collective punishment. Sullivan's blog is based on a news story from Yahoo News, which in turn is just a re-post from Reuters News Service which itself is a story about story published in a Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten.

Aftenposten "claims" it has all 250,000 diplomatic cables that Jullian Assange and Wikileaks say they have but have not released. The Reuters' story notes the information about Israel's economic policy toward Gaza  comes from a cable dated November 3, 2008. This cable must be in Aftenposten's collection because it has not been released on Cablegate (there is nothing from November 3, 2008, assuming the date has been correctly reported by Reuters, which itself is a question mark).

In other words, the entire story is based on unsubstantiated information from one newspaper which claims to have original diplomatic cables but has not saw fit to share them with the world and a newspaper that was not among Wikileaks' chosen few of so-called reliable media partners. Moreover, Aftenposten no longer publishes a English edition of its online service so to read the original report one must know Norwegian or know of a Norwegian who can read it to you.

While the Reuters' story makes the connection between the source of the cable and Aftenposten abundantly clear, neither Mitchell nor Sullivan bothered to note that the source of their information is suspect and has not been corroborated by anyone outside of a few select Norwegians.

While I fully support Mitchell's and Sullivan's right to yammer on about anything they like or that their publishers will publish, they have a duty, as serious "bloggers" or "online journalists" to question the source of the information and tell their readers where the information is coming from, just like serious journalists do everywhere else.

The reason this is important should be self-evident: online journalism is the future and the co-ability to report information and have that information fed to massive audiences means getting the information right is even more important than it has ever been. Yet what we see is the proliferation of unreliable reporting and the failure of journalistic standards. It's not whether the cable is right or wrong or whether Sullivan's opinion is right or wrong, it's about ensuring audiences understand the nature of the information so they can judge for themselves.