You can't trust all the news you read or hear as 100 per cent factually accurate. Journalists are expected to check their sources and double-check information they receive, but even the most fastidious of journalists make mistakes. There are ethics and standards, and journalists (tempting though it may be) are not supposed to totally fabricate stories. It does happen, of course - or then again, maybe aliens do eat babies and turn boys into fish fingers - and it also happens that time pressure means not all facts are checked as thoroughly as they might be.
But the Internet has expanded the room for error, in at least two ways: it has increased the competitive time pressure, as websites vie to post a story quickly; and it's provided many, many new sources of information - which is not always as reliable as it looks.
Sometimes completely unsubstantiated stories have been picked up by traditional media. Earlier this year, a conservative Christian radio network, American Family Radio, reported a story about James Carville (one of Bill Clinton's advisers) having been jailed in Maryland following an incident which involved him firing a pistol and wielding a hunting knife. The network said it got the story from a publication called the Montgomery County Ledger that was posted on an anti-Clinton website. On further investigation there were a number of holes in the story: it reported the incident happened in Carville's home in Maryland - he lives in Virginia; it supposedly happened on a day when Carville was actually giving speeches hundreds of miles away.
A couple of phone calls - not least to the relevant police department - could quickly have "verified" this story (i.e. shown it was nonsense). But it was taken by many at face value and it rapidly flew around the US via the Internet. The facility to update or report news stories all day long puts a certain time pressure on journalists and makes it easy to see how people would put up information which could be true! To pre-empt being scooped by online publications, even reputable newspapers have at times cut corners and put up stories on their own websites which are not fully checked.
But it can be difficult in some cases to find the person who created a site and posted "information", which means the temptation to invent brilliantly fascinating stories is huge - there's little risk of libel suits.
In Ireland the usual libel rules, under defamation legislation, apply to the Internet: you can't damage someone's reputation with a story that you can't prove is true. In fact, some people feel libel cases should treat the Internet differently, regarding a libel on the web as more damaging and permanent in impact, because information is so easily copied and passed on. Where the source of the libel can be tracked down, the person is subject to the same law as publishers in mainstream media. One of the most famous US cases concerns one of the Internet's more notorious journalists, Matt Drudge, of the online Drudge Report.
He is often regarded as an Internet gossip columnist, and his critics castigate him as a scandal-monger with no formal training in journalism. Nonetheless, his site is believed to have six million visits a year. Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and, being able to publish updates all day long, he became a primary source of information for mainstream media during the whole affair.
About 18 months ago, Drudge published a story claiming inaccurately that Sidney Blumenthal, a White House special assistant, physically abused his wife. Within a day Drudge apologised to Blumenthal, admitting the story was completely untrue. Blumenthal is suing Drudge for $30 million.
Brian Trench, a lecturer in journalism at Dublin City University, recently ran a course on online journalism and professional issues at the European Journalism Centre in the Netherlands.
"We're familiar with most of the ethical issues posed by the development of online media," he says. "But they are posed in an accentuated form because it is easier to defraud the reader.
"Plagiarism, for example, was always ethically outlawed, but it is easier to plagiarise with access to the Internet, because we're able to draw on a much greater range of sources and get away with it."
Journalists working in mainstream media are often accused of manipulating quotes to create a story which they want to write, but according to Trench, for journalists writing online, "it is easier to manipulate the story. Re-processing information can be done a lot easier. Examples of this kind of defrauding may not be as gross as libel, but they can make people appear to say things which misrepresent them. It can also happen in mature media, but the temptation with online journalism is greater."
However, the development of online news isn't all doom and gloom. "It is only fair to say that the potential of the web as a publishing medium, if used in a certain way, is great," Trench says. "It has the potential for more response, and to be a responsible medium." The capacity for links and virtually unlimited space means reporters can be more open about the background to their stories. "Using hypertextuality, journalists can show the source documents of the story to the reader, and the reader can see what the journalist has done with the information.
"Using it as an interactive medium, journalists can get feedback. People can comment on something they've read, or send in information on a report regarding something they know to be wrong, and thereby ensure greater veracity.
"Everything comes down to how we journalists use it, and the awareness and understanding the end user has. Currently, online readers probably do take a more sceptical view of things they read and hear."
Trench does not favour new legislation to control online information. "It should be a self-regulating service. It would be good if people publishing online got together and devised standards, as do newspaper publishers. There is a need to look at how we can safeguard the truth of what we're saying."
