Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

news providers who used the NATO press conferences to provide the
rump of their information on the war were placed in something of a
quandary as spokespeople changed their story in response to contradictions
which often first appeared on the Internet. To emphasise
NATO’s prevarications by filing such corrections too frequently
would, by implication, have been construed as being unhelpful.
On Friday 14 May, for instance, MSNBC filed a headline report, on
the basis of information from Serbia, about NATO’s accidental
cluster bombing of the Kosovo village of Korisa resulting in the death
of 87 people . Over the
weekend NATO changed their version of the event to claim that the
Serbs had used the villagers as human shields. By the following
Monday the MSNBC’s URL addressed a different story 24 and the
Korisa story had completely disappeared. MSNBC were using the
same URL for all their new Kosovo stories which meant that there
was no way for readers to identify errors, corrections and, in this
instance apparently, erasures. More importantly, there was a loss of
integrity between the page appearing as news and its deposit in the
archives. The occultation has disturbing implications for historians
wishing to use online news archives as their primary source.
The Virtual Caravelle
Armageddon.com: Home Pages and Refugees 109
The journalist Don North writing to the General Journalism Discussion
list, describes how, a generation before, he and the other Western
journalists in Vietnam were accused of ‘sitting around in the
Caravelle bar [in Saigon] interviewing each other’. 25 He justifies the
practice by suggesting that the bar was the best place to pick up
rumour and gossip, the leads that effective journalism relies on. Much
more contentious in terms of professional integrity is the manner in
which both the Falklands and Gulf Wars were reported under a
seamless blanket of total information management by the Allied
forces, with audiences being comprehensively denied oppositional
views. North’s worry is that contemporary journalism, from its new
virtual watering hole, will further damage its reputation by merely
‘using the same background from the web and filing identical stories’.
It is a timely point. The national TV networks, including the BBC
which still has 45 foreign bureaux of its own, increasingly turn to
feed-sharing arrangements with CNN (which, with 25 including its