Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

‘Too Fresh to Be True’ 133
We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices.
Every citizen can be a reporter, can take on the powers that be …
time was only newsrooms had access to the full pictures of the
day’s events, but now any citizen does. We get to see the kind of
cuts that are made for all kinds of reasons; endless layers of editors
with endless agendas changing bits and pieces, so by the time the
newspaper hits your welcome mat, it had no meaning. Now, with
a modem, anyone can follow the world and report on the world
– no middle man, no big brother. 11
Drudge’s willingness to publish unverified material (often uncovered,
rejected or awaiting verification by others) brought critical
attention to the willingness of some of the web’s editors to take
advantage of the medium’s capacity for instant publication. The fact
that the web allows journalists to publish breaking stories almost
instantly leads to managements insisting on rapid-fire publication
and a 24-hour news cycle.
News, whether it be print, broadcast or webcast, no longer allows
the luxury of confirmation by at least two sources – the principle
that Woodward and Bernstein insisted upon as they broke the
Watergate story 25 years before Linda Tripp’s claims about Monica
Lewinsky. In many American states, and in other countries, the willingness
to publish a retraction can have a strongly mitigating effect
on cases of libel and Drudge defended his libels and bad judgements
by claiming that he could and does publish retractions as swiftly as
assertions when necessary. In the case of many of his Clinton revelations,
as we have seen, that particular stable door was swept off its
hinges as they were immediately followed by an uncontrolled journalistic
feeding frenzy. It is very difficult for the retraction to ever
catch up with the untruth that spawned it. One of the equations that
online journalism needs to solve is a way of balancing instantaneous
release of news with equally immediate critical feedback. The
problem with instant news is that when it is wrong it tends to be
buried, sedimenting into and reinforcing its context, rather than
corrected.
The reciprocal of the argument, of course, is made by those who,
for whatever reason – perhaps the sensibilities of polititians and
advertisers – would have the facts constrained within ‘acceptable’
parameters. In describing Hillary Clinton’s response to Drudge’s