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May 23, 2005
Media Is Truth
...and sometimes that is good, and sometimes not so much
Interesting few weeks for Newsweek. So let me get this straight: I can establish a magazine tomorrow and by doing so I am automatically protected by the first amendment to publish whatever I want, which is a fundamental freedom that separates this great country from many others. As a test of this great freedom, I can print a story that based on my diligent fact gathering and vetting process I believe to be truthful, however inflammatory, in the interest of reporting the Truth. If I can publish a story that is offensive enough, people in other countries might riot and I can singlehandedly damage international relations for years to come.
Getting The Shit Back In The Horse
When things get really out of hand, my government’s State Department will conduct international damage control to quell the unpalatable results of my offensive story. Then when my country’s president finally calls to tell me my inflammatory story is threatening our nation’s interests abroad, I will just rescind it. I will issue a brief press release that says, “I retract the story,” and all will be fine. And that is when the party really gets started.
One needn’t discuss the morality of war, political tactics or the influence religion can have on a great many people to understand the fundamental issue here. The Newsweek article has turned into an examination of the concept of Truth. Was the Newsweek article true? I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter because in any case Truth is very much a matter of public opinion, and the damage has already been done. But it puts the incumbent media companies in a difficult position: If the story was not true, then the vetting process, the basic journalistic integrity of the organization and the very notion of self-regulated freedom of the press gets called into question. If the story was true, but was rescinded because of political pressures, then the vetting process, the basic journalistic integrity of the organization and the very notion of self-regulated freedom of the press gets called into question. Either way, the media incumbent loses. Either their process is broken and some senator somewhere is preparing a bill to regulate news media and we are a few strokes away from losing the freedom of the press or their process is sound and their retraction was based on political pressure and we have already lost the freedom of the press.
Truth in a one-way distribution channel is Propaganda
Media Is Truth, and that truth has been flowing one-way for so long that we had come to believe it until it really started to get out of hand. “They couldn’t print it if it weren’t true” is a cliché we now use to mockingly defend supermarket tabloid headlines. “Man stuck in refrigerator eats own foot to survive.” But a tabloid is just entertainment, and even though the information is presented as fact, the journalistic construct does not apply to them.
Then the NYT had their scandal, and it was shocking for a moment that the NYT would fabricate news. Shocking. But in the back of your mind you were calculating the likelihood of the very same thing happening at other newspapers around the world just based on sheer numbers the same way you rationally calculate the likelihood of life on other planets. “Well, there are billions of stars, and we assume a lot of them have planets, and some of those probably look like Earth…” and so on, and you come up with a very good likelihood that life exists on other planets, just like there is a good likelihood that many other newspapers around the world have fabricated stories.
Then Dan Rather ended his career in a fairly spectacular way, and it was shocking for a moment that CBS News would fabricate news. Shocking. But again it made you think, didn’t it? I mean, you don’t believe everything you see on TV, but you did generally assume that you could trust CBS News to convey the Truth, right?
And so you went to the internet. Now, if you cannot believe everything you see on TV, then you certainly cannot believe everything you see on the internet. But the internet is different in that you can plug into the blogosphere for a few minutes to explore an issue and weigh the thousands of results you find for yourself. You find some opinion, some fact, some agenda-promoting half-truths, some lies and some pure fiction. But there is strength in numbers. What you find in the blogosphere is a sort of user-generated zeitgeist that enables you to arrive at the truth or whatever version of it you choose to believe in. It isn’t perfect, but at least it engages the consumer in a dialog of truth rather than pushing it at them primetime news-style.
Distributing Truth at the edge of the network
Rather than making one organization the arbiter of truth, with their story told through the lens of their one camera and spoken from their reporter’s one voice, put the cameras into everybody’s hands and give them a tool to swarm around the truth from multiple perspectives. When the masses are able to render their version of the truth in a forum of public opinion, interesting patterns emerge that can act as a sort of populist bullshit meter. When citizen journalists are connected in a massively multi-user environment that enables them not only to record events as they happen but also to distribute their media rapidly, corrupted elections can be identified, unfavorable leaders can be ousted from power and false police reports can be refuted.
This distributed network of content creators can have other benefits, too. For instance, recently T-Mobile upgraded their voicemail system, and it has caused me and several other people problems that are evidently difficult for T-Mobile to identify and correct. Derrick wrote about it on his blog a few months ago, and now he gets a dozen hits per day from people searching for “tmobile voicemail problem.” So apparently many people have had the same problem. This would be valuable information for T-Mobile to know as a way to collect these edge-case user problems and more rapidly address them. All they have to do is give Derrick a special number or link to post on his blog so that he can route the hits to them. (He asked them to do this, but customer support does not currently acknowledge that there is any problem.)
There is also a huge opportunity for incumbent news media companies. Rather than look at mobloggers as a threat, the news organizations should be embracing these mobile citizen journalists as stringers. If I worked at Reuters, I would love to have a million people out in the field recording events as they happen working for me for free. People would do it for attribution alone because they simply want to share important news.
The good thing about distributing truth is that if you have a very large number of people rendering their version of the truth, the chances of collusion and promotion of a singular interest are reduced, and what you are left with is a bell curve of opinions. The center of the bell curve usually represents the most reliable version of the truth, though it could simply represent the most people who are wrong about something. And that is where the journalistic vetting process could be applied to improve the entire process overall, turning news organizations into packagers and enablers of truth rather than editors of truth, which has led to a certain growing distrust of the news media industry in general.
The Upstream Truth
Whenever something really big happens, it happens before any reporter or newsvan can get there to report on it. The first pictures and video we see of a major event are always amateur footage. The truth is something we often find out after the fact. The biggest problem with Truth is that if you weren’t there to witness it with your own eyes, it cannot be trusted. So what if there was a marketplace to transact the truth? What if the people who witness the truth could share it with the world in real time as it happens? What if the actual pictures and video of life as it happens could be posted directly from the source to a place to share? That is the link on the value chain that is missing right now. People are buying camera phones faster than any other consumer electronic device. But they aren’t using them as much as they could be using them. Missing is the direct link between a user’s camera phone and a place to post media to show the world and a marketplace to transact that media across a massively scalable system or overlapping personal networks. This story on Reuters today concurs with this point of view.
Rabble solves this problem and gives consumers this missing link on the value chain. I have said before that the hype around downstream media (TV on your phone) is misplaced and overblown. The real opportunity in mobile media is providing the tool to everyone to create upstream media and share it as widely as possible.
Rabble is now ready to launch, and we are unveiling it at the upcoming BREW conference in San Diego on June 1st. Come check it out, won't you? If you would like to learn more, please feel free to drop me an email.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at May 23, 2005 01:18 PM