Community over clicks
Let's take a quick look at what didn't happen in Starkville this past week.
There wasn't a school shooting in
Oktibbeha County.
No local schools were placed on lockdown and, as it turns out, there wasn't a masked man going around
“braking” into houses and raping women across the city.
At the Starkville Daily News, we knew about each non-issue as the speculation swelled on the Facebook and Twitter feeds of people in the community. But, before we reported the first word, we confirmed that both were simply unsubstantiated nonsense posted on social media.
We went on about our day, deciding to not heavily publicize the incidents, or lack thereof.
Experience tells me that, had we written a full story about something not happening, we would have been lambasted for playing into the chaos and propagating the misinformation circulated on social media.
I've seen this happen in other places, with readers saying “If nothing happened, then why did you do a story?”
A handful of keyboard warriors were quick to condemn the paper for not caring or listening to “the children” in the wake of both occurrences, but I can assure you, the decision was made wholly out of respect. It's a call editors in newsrooms across the country have to make every day, with each case presenting its own set of individual challenges.
One time-tested general guideline is to simply not print rumors or innuendo because of the legitimacy it can add to the source of misinformation. It gives certain people the attention they seek and only serves to encourage more of the same once it enters the media sphere.
Still, the air of our current social climate is thick with paranoia and fear, especially following the Parkland school shooting. In a breaking news situation, media can't immediately get information from officials as a situation is still unfolding, so they have to rely on bystanders and talk to experts who study the subject. Sometimes, that initial reporting can get dangerously close to irresponsible speculation framed as fact.
I remember seeing one tweet in the wake of the shooting in Florida that said 20-50 people were killed … while the real number still sits at 17.
So, how have we as local media and a community handled the paranoia boiling over in our own back yard?
We rush headlong like hogs to the trough to believe typo-riddled social media posts and allow our community to be driven into chaos over nothing, simply because the vast majority of social media users don't care about facts and some media outlets don't seem concerned with the residual effects of their recklessness.
While I'm not a member, I believe the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) puts it plainly in its Code of Ethics: “Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage.”
Over the last week, I began to slowly lose faith that this belief is important anymore. Have we as media cast aside our moral aversion to rumor and innuendo?
In the present, many intelligent and hardworking people are justifiably too busy to be media literate and, in turn, media is content to capitalize on it by employing anonymous sources and drumming up chaos during false alarms, just for the website traffic and exposure.
Don't get me wrong. I'm just as complicit as everyone else because I did make a conscious decision to acknowledge the events on the SDN's social media, despite both being the result of debunked social media posts.
But, I will have to be dragged out of my office by my ankles before I allow the community's paper of record to publish stories that lend a microphone to people simply looking to cause drama.
I'm not patting myself on the back because I think I did the right thing. Rather, I believe it is important to explain the ethical choices and processes of the paper to our audience with the goal of encouraging a civil dialogue about journalistic practices … which is a central tenet of the SPJ Code of Ethics.
I'm fortunate enough to have seen this applied firsthand when I worked as a statehouse reporter for the Associated Press in Atlanta.
In one instance, we had someone announce they were coming to downtown with the intention of hosting an armed rally where a Koran would be torn up on the Capitol grounds.
We were intially told “thousands” of gunwielding nationalists would attend and it was to be the banner event of the season for the Deep South alt-right.
But, as reality would have it, only two guys showed up.
My editor at that time was and is a brilliant journalist and the best in the business at what he does. I remember to this day the long conversation we had about how to handle the story.
Without getting too much into the inhouse details, the order came down from up top that I was to get to the bottom of what
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