A Few Words On Twitter, Journalism and Mike Wise
Washington Post sports columnist Mike Wise tried to make a statement about the way that we consume media in the social media age. For that, he's reportedly been suspended from his job for a month. The lesson: no one is bigger than the medium.
Here's the context. Yesterday, Wise decided to run a little experiment -- tweeting three pieces of fake news, in the hopes that he could prove that someone would run them without fact checking, in some kind of attempt to either prove that real reporting is dead, or that blogs aren't worth their salt, or both. Wise never claimed any sources in the tweets, but his notes were picked up and attributed to him in stories about the people in them. Wise then outed the tweets as fake on his radio show, and bragged about the boost in followers they provided. Then everyone called Wise out, while his editors at the Post laid the interoffice smackdown.
We noted Wise's mea culpa in yesterday's Go Home Already, but it was clear that this the scheme -- since it gambled with chips obtained with equity in the reputation of the Post itself -- was far beyond a simple apology. Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk -- who was one of the few national sources to republish Wise's claim that Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger would be suspended for five games -- said that Wise "should be glad he wasn't fired."
For his part, Wise did realize the gravity of his actions today, during his radio show:
Integrity, being right before being first, is the only thing genuine journalists have left in this world. It pains me to say my own stupid, irresponsible experiment ironically has cost me a chunk of my own credibility today. I'm sorry, especially to the good, smart people at the best place I've ever worked. Even those angry and livid, I know your heart is with the paper and its reputation. I will say you find out in times like these who cares about you beyond a blog post. I'll also say it would be wrong to judge the people calling for your head. I always say our worst moments should not define us - I just didn't think I'd be talking about myself.
What made Wise's experiment so strange is that it was such a losing proposition: by knowingly breaking false news, Wise was either banking that he didn't have the kind of influence that a prominent reporter at one of the world's largest newspapers should have, or was willing to sell some (all?) of his credibility down the toilet in order to take a swing at the validity of Twitter as a news-gathering source. Regardless of what Wise was aiming for, the latter happened. One can only assume that Wise just didn't understand how Twitter has, to borrow from political parlance, changed the game.
Wise's goal of discrediting Twitter as a legitimate source for breaking news was doomed, because it already is one.
But even assuming no prior knowledge of Twitter's ascendancy to legitimacy, Wise's logic had a fatal disconnect: he assumed that there weren't levels of authenticity to Twitter, which, just like any other social construct on Earth, features some people who are reputable concerning whatever and others who aren't. Wise's move would be akin to trying to prove that the police/media information chain is broken by asking a random guy sitting inside the precinct for information about a double homicide. Of course, said random guy's information can't be relied upon for dirt, but getting an answer from the police commander is likely to produce something worth printing. And in the world of Twitter, journalists who work for the Washington Post are that commander.
This is just the way that it works now. Unfortunately, Wise just learned that the hard way.