Edit pre- or post-publication? The Diane Rehm exchange
The first segment of the Diane Rehm show this morning focused on the various online strengths and weaknesses of Barack Obama and John McCain (RealPlayer).
But it started broadly in the areas of how the audience of political news consumers has exploded in the past two presidential cycles.
I was particularly interested in the exchange below about editing content before or after publication. The capper comes at the end of my excerpt. Rehm’s guest, Michael Cornfield, professor at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University, says: “I think we’re better off with sort of social editing after the fact than we were in the age of no opportunity to edit.”
Amen, brother. Now, can you persuade our colleagues?
I heard this exchange in the morning, and later today came across this post on Wired Journalists from Brianne Pruitt, asking for input about whether to edit news copy or allow raw copy to be posted online. It produced a number of thoughtful comments, most of which I agree with. It boiled down to this: It depends.
What wasn’t discussed was blogging, where, again, different newsrooms have different standards. More often than not, I see newsrooms allowing their reporters to blog unfettered by an editing process. Mine does — and readers catch us on mistakes, and we correct them. I know I have. It seems, frankly, akin to broadcast newsrooms, where reporters are allowed to speak live on the air about news developments. They are trusted to do their jobs professionally.
The exchange I excerpt below involved host Rehm, Cornfield, and Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project (who references the study I blogged about here). It started as Rainie noted how widely available unfiltered information is to political junkies.
Diane Rehm
I would wonder whether there is some downsides to it, whether unfiltered information simply coming from one’s particular point of view, unfiltered, moving in all kinds of directions that used to engage an editing process, whether there isn’t some downside.
Lee Rainie
What people tend to be concerned about tends to run in two flavors. The first is just wrong information. When lots more people can publish and vent and spin themselves into the political process, there is a concern, and we picked it up in our survey, about 60 percent of Americans believe there is so much information online that people are believing the wrong thing and they just got different pictures in their head from what the truth and reality is.
Rehm
Give me an example.
Rainie
Well, for instance, our colleagues at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press have found a significant portion of American adults believe that Barack Obama is Muslim, in part because there are lots of e-mails and websites that are promoting the notion that he might be.
Rehm
Are those promotions put out there to deliberately misinform or simply the result of one’s belief in this misinformation?
Rainie
It’s both things. There are clearly people in whose interest it is to show misinformation, but there are people who somewhat innocently, but believingly, pass it along because they think their friends should know it. This is the age of social networks. Through e-mail, through blogs and other things like that you can talk to your friends and influence your friends.
And your verdict about something is perhaps more important to your friends than the verdict or credentialed organizations like news organizations or places where the editing process has been very thorough. (emphasis is mine — kg)
Michael Cornfield
Well, I disagree. I actually think this is an optimistic development and let me explain why. In the old days, when something came out of journalism, that was its final form and if it was wrong, there were horrible reverberations and horrible consequences.
So, there was a primacy on having good editing, whether it’s a news magazine or radio show or newspaper and making sure it was right when it hit public view. In the age of the Internet, the editing happens after publication, not before.
By which I mean bad information comes out, but now, we have a chance to go to the web sites, to have journalists go to the web sites and society corrects bad information. I think it’s great that in Lee’s survey, a majority of Americans are skeptical of what they see on the Internet - and that is an essential attitude.
You can’t believe what you see the first time out. But you can check. And you can wait. And many of the bad information stories that have been a part of the 2008 campaign have been corrected.
Now, does everybody believe the right answer? No, of course not. But I think we’re better off with sort of social editing after the fact than we were in the age of no opportunity to edit.