Media as Referee? Not Anymore; New York Times, 8/23/16

[Podcast] Michael Barbaro, New York Times; Media as Referee? Not Anymore:

"The syringe started off as a conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton’s health posted on a fringe right-wing website. It traveled to the legitimizing megaphone of prime-time cable news. And it ended, after an agonizing journey through the new realities of the campaign media, with a single phone call that debunked its entire existence. There was no syringe.

Along the way, the syringe that wasn’t revealed everything there is to know about the truth, the media and this topsy-turvy presidential campaign. On the latest episode of The Run-Up, we explore what happened to truth in this campaign and who’s to blame for the new world of truth-shading and outright falsehoods."

Someone is wrong on the Internet. That’s where I come in.; Washington Post, 8/19/16

Brooke Binkowski, Washington Post; Someone is wrong on the Internet. That’s where I come in. :

"...[T]his work is a social good. In addition to the hate mail, we receive a lot of frightened mail, from people who aren’t certain about their place in an increasingly scary world, where danger seemingly lurks around every corner. Times are changing, yes, but some websites take advantage of that uncertainty by plucking stories from the news and fluffing them up to make it appear as though there’s going to be a major disaster any minute now. (Recent examples included activity on a major fault line that supposedly signified an imminent massive earthquake on the West Coast, and the closure of cargo routes in the North Atlantic. Neither of these stories were true.) Concerned people pass along the stories, “just in case,” and spread the anxiety further. The people who own clickbait sites are never held accountable for dealing in fear. They do, however, make quite a lot of money from advertising.

We don’t think that our work will affect people committed to their belief systems to the exclusion of all facts. But Snopes can be a place where people begin their own research; we can be a reference for people who care to excavate the facts behind the often-terrifying headlines. We don’t pretend to be, nor do we want to be, the final word on any subject. We would like to be a starting point, though. In cases where clickability and virality trump fact, we feel that knowledge is the best antidote to fear."