Somewhere among the twists and turns of the Internet there must be information we can rely on enough to make informed decisions. Yet we seem to have entered the age of WYSIWYG -- What You See Is What You Get -- and all we can say for sure is what's on the screen at the moment because it's too much work to find information that connects to facts on the ground and stays constant long enough to be useable.
First Treasure Hunt
On July 1, I posted a story on a Unite for Change event in Prescott, Ariz., on OhmyNews where it still hasn't received any comments. Thinking that it would get read by more people in Arizona, I also put it on AZ Central, the home of The Arizona Republic and NBC News, Phoenix, where it collected nothing but trash. Since AZ Central has no comment control and didn't respond to my violation reports, about the only thing I could do as an author is delete the inappropriate/off-topic remarks.
However, one comment by ThomasMoore on July 1 at 8:08 p.m. demanded more attention as it claimed the following:
It's not a secret any more, Dave, about where the millions of dollars are coming from that Obama has been receiving, so much that he went back on his promise to accept the spending limits of public campaign financing.
The millions are not from small donations of $25 to $100, as Obama has claimed. It's been traced to banks in Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries, as well as a bank in China. The many small donations come from only a few credit-card accounts.
Wealthy foreigners, including the radical Islamic Wahabi sect that supports Osama bin Ladin, are attempting to provide millions of dollars for television ads to influence the U.S. Presidential election.
Don't take my word; read NYT columnist Maureen Dowd, who's about as liberal as anyone who works for that newspaper. Click on this link:
http://www.azcentral.com/members/Blog/ThomasMoore/26838 The link wasn't to The New York Times but to his own blog, which contained something that looked like an article by Dowd followed by comments that took it as fact. I doubled checked, and found there was no such article. I sent violation reports to AZ Central, I sent reports to Maureen Dowd at The New York Times, I posted an article on my blog on www.barackobama.com, I sent a report to Fight The Smears on www.barackobama.com. Nothing came of it until somebody named Harrison double-checked that I was the first person to spot the spoof and said that, if so, he knew somebody in the mainstream media that might be able to do something about it.
In any case, as of this writing there are 30 comments by 14 users on the article with only a few by myself and Harrison, who helped bring it to the attention of the mainstream media, realizing that it's a spoof.
To make a long story short, word of the spoof eventually wound up catching the attention of Bill Adair, Washington bureau chief for St. Petersburg Times and writer for www.politifact.com, who produced an article, Bogus Dowd column spreads quickly. The spoof or articles about the spoof have spread to who-knows-how-many Web sites: to get the latest count, Googling "obama 'Maureen Dowd' bogus OR fake OR spoof" will pull up a good sample -- currently over a million -- with some people still maintaining the information is real.
Meanwhile, ThomasMoore has (conveniently?) gone on a two month cruise and won't have Internet access until September (see "I'll Be Gone, for Awhile").
I've killed all the comments on the original article except enough to show how this whole mess started, and unpublished the three other articles I had on AZ Central. Putting up material on sites like AZ Central is like making a vegetable garden without a fence and letting wild critters have a field day.
Second Treasure Hunt
Yesterday I started the second treasure hunt: checking articles that were complete and correct copies of mainstream media articles but failed to have attribution. I kept seeing them among the 100 new articles that come on my RSS feed every hour from www.barackobama.com but hadn't checked to see if they were also spoofs or just sloppy workmanship.
I found a post from Ian O's Blog that looked like it might qualify: here's the Title, Author, Body containing the secondary byline, and the first paragraph:
NY Times: Obama Raises $52 Million in June
By Ian O - Jul 17th, 2008 at 8:10 am EDT
By Jeff Zeleny
Senator Barack Obama raised $52 million in June, his campaign announced on Thursday morning, more than twice the amount he raised one month earlier before claiming the Democratic presidential nomination. My original Google search picked up an article on The New York Times by the same author and whose title was almost the same but the body was different: "Barack Obama Raised $52 Million in June." While different, the basic information was the same. Didn't make sense … why make a spoof with the same information?
I changed my search to "Obama Raises $52 Million in June Jeff Zeleny" and found a mass of conflicting pages.
There are TWO articles on The New York Times by the same author with the same date, one with a time stamp, one without: "Barack Obama Raised $52 Million in June" and "Barack Obama Raises $52 Million in June."
There was an article on craigslist with the title "Barack Obama Raises $52 Million in June" with the attribution pointing to the correct page on The New York Times.
There was a page on Daylife that listed two somewhat similar articles:
The first had a similar title, "Barack Obama Raised $52 Million in June," but was a different article by a different author on The Washington Post. (Note: This was on the page when I first did this research at roughly 10 a.m. MST on July 17. But the link no longer goes to the article, just a general information page on The Washington Post.)
The second had a different title, "The Morning Report," but had "'Senator Barack Obama raised $52 million in June' (Jeff Zeleny, New York Times)" although the link went to Real Clear Politics. (Note: This was on the page when I first did this research at roughly 10 a.m. MST on July 17, but no longer appears.)
Checking the "The Morning Report," I found a different list of articles, one of them being this:
"Senator Barack Obama raised $52 million in June" (Jeff Zeleny, New York Times) -- Senator Barack Obama raised $52 million in June, his campaign announced on Thursday morning, more than twice the amount he raised one month earlier before claiming the Democratic presidential nomination. If you've been following all this, you'll realize that the title "Senator Barack Obama raised $52 million in June" is that of the first of the two articles on The New York Times. However, if you click the link (or look at the URL) you find that it's to the SECOND of the two articles on The New York Times, whose title is "Barack Obama Raises $52 Million in June."
Further, as you can see above, if you bookmark pages such as these, there's no guarantee that the links in the bookmarked page will continue to go to the same place and you have no evidence to show that you yourself didn't make a mistake.
My conclusion is that we've entered the world of WYSIWYG. You can no longer necessarily refer back to something to make sure you remembered it right. And if you saved the page to your hard drive, there is no way for you to guarantee to others that it's not a spoof.
I can understand plain-and-simple bloggers not including links to original articles as they're just talking "over the back fence." But one would think that articles on Web sites such as AZ Central or www.barackobama.com would be more reliable. I had some suspicions of why this might be so and found they were shared by Lev Grossman in his "Post Apocalypse" article in the July 21 issue of Time:
The horribleness of commenters isn't really a mystery: Internet anonymity is disinhibiting, and people are basically mean anyway. Nor is it a mystery why the people who run websites put up with commenters: the economic model for Internet content is based on advertising, which means it's based on traffic volume, and comments mean traffic. They're part of the things that make online publishing work. TIME.com enables comments on its blogs, including mine.) It's just hard to tell whether they're ruining the Web faster than they can save it. Perhaps the only thing we can hope for is somebody who will actually get the United States back on track, and at the same time is clever enough to become president for the wrong reasons.
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