User:Michael Snow/Blame game



Journalist blames Wikipedia for media misinformation
 * By Michael Snow, 7 November 2005

As the established media struggle to uphold their credibility, one journalist has laid blame on Wikipedia for contributing to declining accuracy in news reports.

The charge was quoted in a Tuesday St. Petersburg Times column entitled "You can take our word for it - but check to make sure". Written by Eric Deggans, the newspaper's media critic, the general thrust of the column was to show how misinformation, once it "appears in one reputable news source", can get repeated over and over by other journalists.

As part of his article, Deggans turned to technology columnist and author Preston Gralla for comment. According to the story, Gralla included Wikipedia as one of his biggest peeves in the recycling of such information via search engines to deadline-rushed reporters. The column quoted Gralla as saying, "It has made the news less trustworthy". He went on to say, "People read things online and then they think it is true, even among professional journalists".

The incident used by Deggans to illustrate his overall point was the widely reported "fact" that former FEMA secretaries Michael Brown and Joe Allbaugh were college roommates. (In reality, while the two were friends from Oklahoma, they did not attend the same college and apparently never roomed together.) The point did appear in the Wikipedia article on Brown for over two weeks; from the outset, however, it was always cited via footnote to a major media source (the original citation was to the Boston Herald). Deggans' review indicated that the misconception could be traced back to a few articles written about Brown prior to Hurricane Katrina.

In this situation, Wikipedia was not originally responsible for the error, and it seems likely that journalists simply relied on their fellow professionals in perpetuating the error. However, critics have pointed to at least one previous incident in which a journalist apparently relied on Wikipedia for information that proved inaccurate (see archived story).

As Gralla put it, "That's the problem journalists face: If you don't get the small things right, it will make people disbelieve the entire story - or other stories you've written." The same presumably could be said about Wikipedia articles; then again, Wikipedia is also more open to letting readers fix these little errors.