Week Five Weblog

Ethical Issues of Finding Past News Information on the Internet

After reading Burbules' Paradoxes of the Web: The Ethical Dimensions of Credibility I was reminded of the incident of the 13 trapped West Virginia miners in early January of this year. Specifically, I remembered the day I went to Yahoo! to check my email and saw a news headline announcing that 12 of the miners had been found alive. Then, later that day, while checking my email again, I saw a headline that reversed this claim. Apparently, a mistake had been made in the media. Consequently, there had been false information announced on TV and radio, printed in newspapers, and put online (covering orality, literacy and secondary orality) because of a miscommunication between rescuers and journalists.

This week's topic for class prompted me to search the Internet for the original articles stating this false information, secondary articles that discussed the reversed claim, and any articles that analyzed the repercussions of such an occurrence. This allowed me, for the purposes of this response paper, to explore Burbules' conditions that make the Internet a "different and challenging credibility context" (including some of his dimensions of defining credibility) with his four elements of credibility in mind (proxies of credibility, skepticism of all information found, determent of judgment to those we trust, online communities of common interest of concern).

My first attempt searching for articles was through Yahoo! and proved to be fruitless. There were so many hits about the coal miners in general, that finding ones that discussed the media mistake seemed nearly impossible. I immediately became a victim of "the illusion that whatever cannot be found must not be very important," as Burbules discusses in the comprehensiveness dimension of credibility (p. 449). It also is an example of Burbules' first factor that makes searching for information online a "different and challenging credibility context." This is that there is so much information out there (the "sheer volume") it becomes overwhelmingly difficult to find anything (p.442). I continued my search on Yahoo!, digging further into the list of hits and I came across this online article:

Coverage of Miners' Deaths Raises Questions (use link)
http://www.hcnonline.com/site/index.cfm?BRD=1574&dept_id=532224&newsid=15892618&PAG=461&rfi=9

This is an online article posted by Houston Community Newspapers Online for The Courier News of Montgomery County written by a weekly columnist. The writer describes how his particular newspaper (The Courier News) was careful not to print a headline that proclaimed the miners were alive but rather that family members were. He mentions how USA Today and The New York Post, in contrast, printed headlines that simply said, "Alive! Miners Beat Odds" and "Alive!", respectively. The writers last line of the The Courier article is, "It is easy to see how the wrong information could get out and it is amazing how far that information traveled in so little time." Here, he is tapping into Brubules' third factor that makes it complicated to search for credible information online: that the "speed of [information's] growth" and "rate of dispersion with which information can circulate" are enormous (p. 444). But if this information spread so far and wide, why was I having trouble finding it? This can be explained by Brubules' first factor of volume, and also by what I encountered by changing my search strategy which I detail below.

The difficulty of searching Yahoo! for much of the information I was seeking (especially original articles) led me to switch to Google. There, I was much more successful. I received more hits that pertained to my search (using the same word string as when I searched Yahoo!). I also discovered a feature Google has that solved another problem I was encountering. This problem was that many of the hits' links were giving me "error pages" that stated the article was no longer available. This occurred when searching for a copy of an original story stating the miners were alive from Newsday.com, and for two Yahoo! articles that were critical of the mistake. Luckily, Google had a "cached" link at the end of every hit that allowed me to view an archived "snapshot" of the missing articles. This solved my problem and suggests that Google takes a standpoint of seeing information in its original form as credible in the sense that it is "useful, relevant or interesting" (Brubules, p. 448). Certainly the original form was useful and relevant to my search.

"Unavailable" Original Newsday.com article (use link):
One Worker Found Dead In West Virginia Mine, But Hours Later Rest of Men Trapped By Explosion Rescued, As Family Celebrates
http://www.newsday.com/news/yahoo/ny-usaliv044574468jan04,0,2374147.story?coll=ny-newsaol-headlines

Google snapshot of above article (use link):
http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:ACUWuadYgQYJ:www.newsday.com/news/yahoo/ny-usaliv044574468jan04,0,2374147.story%3Fcoll%3Dny-newsaol-headlines+west+virginia+miners+12+cell+phone+found+alive+yahoo!+news&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=2

Why Newsday.com and Yahoo! chose to remove their articles is a very important question. Perhaps these two news media decided, upon the timeliness notion of credibility (Brubules, p. 449), they were irrelevant. Or, maybe they decided to censor information to avoid being used as examples of this terrible mistake. Either way, without Google, I would not have found any these articles.

"Unavailable" Critical Yahoo! News article: (use link)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ep/20060109/en_bpiep/seriousquestionsonsourcinginminerescuestoryremain

Google snapshot of above article: (use link)
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:5zs8lzw__h4J:yahoo.reuters.com/financeQuoteCompanyNewsArticle.jhtml%3Fduid%3Dmtfh55304_2006-01-05_04-35-03_n04344797_newsml+west+virginia+miners+12+cell+phone+found+alive+yahoo!+news&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=9

"Unavailable" Critical Yahoo!/Reuters article: (use link)
http://yahoo.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?storyID=urn:newsml:reuters.com:20060105:MTFH55304_2006-01-05_04-35-03_N04344797&related=true

Google snapshot of above article: (use link)
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:5zs8lzw__h4J:yahoo.reuters.com/financeQuoteCompanyNewsArticle.jhtml%3Fduid%3Dmtfh55304_2006-01-05_04-35-03_n04344797_newsml+west+virginia+miners+12+cell+phone+found+alive+yahoo!+news&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=9

The response to the mistake took on various forms. There were high profile articles as shown directly above (Yahoo.Reuters.com and News.Yahoo.com) which were missing, and then there were lower profile, local articles that remain available to this day. Here is one of these from the Shelby County Reporter (Alabama):

Mine Tragedy Was a News Disaster (use link)
http://www.shelbycountyreporter.com/articles/2006/01/15/opinion/opin02.txt

In the article the writer asks some very relevant questions like, "When was accuracy replaced with speed?" and she quotes David P. Perlmutter: "Modern newscraft, addicted to technology, worships the god of speed. Laptops, satellites and cell phones make live-from ground-zero reporting alluring." In essence what is being discussed in the writer's article is the ethical aspect of reporting information in relation to advanced information technology. This bleeds into the ethical concerns we are considering in this week's topic: finding credible information as members of an information society.

Clifford Lynch writes in When Documents Deceive: Trust and Provenance as New Factors of Information Retrieval in a Tangled Web (p. 16), "...the tools are coming into place that let one determine the source of a metadata assertion...the identity of the person or organization that stands behind the assertion, and to establish a level of trust in this identity." Obviously, Lynch's paper is discussing a topic that covers more than just finding news and news groups, but the notions of trust and credibility are truly what are being examined here. I encountered not the problem of Yahoo! or Newsday.com printing false news information, but rather the difficulty of finding that information later as it pertained to my search. As Anton Vedder writes in Misinformation through the Internet, "In judging the reliability of information, we can use primary criteria of reliability...These are, for instance, requirements of consistency, coherence, accuracy, and accordance with observations." I feel that the Yahoo! and Newsday.com--along with any other news group that deleted similar articles--are behaving in an unethical manner. Google, on the other hand--along with any other web crawlers that use the snapshot principle or news groups that keep their information available despite its falsity--is helping to balance this unfortunate problem.

Other related sites in my search:
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA010406.survivor.EN.45ad0c7e.html

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1551589/posts

http://www.salon.com/wire/ap/archive.html?wire=D8EU1CPO8.html