Never Wrong for Long!

[Gerald]

A colleague from a TV news network was telling me the other day that its informal slogan was now “Never wrong for long.” News goes on air as it emerges in a furious competitive scramble, and then if it proves inaccurate it is supplanted rather than corrected. That, I guess, is what is meant by the new “churnalism.” So intense is the churn that nothing has much weight. Accuracy sometimes seems a quaint journalistic concept. As for truth, it belongs to a distinct moral universe.On the 11th anniversary of 9/11 the Middle East has erupted, driven by a meme — one of those notions that spreads across the new media ecosystem at lightning speed once a spark has been provided, in this case a pitiful porn-like trailer for a movie in which the Prophet Muhammad appears as a highly sexed buffoon. The movie was initially attributed to a Jew who proved not to exist although he had given interviews to The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal. It was later found to be the work of right-wing Christians in California, one a convicted felon. They were aided by a member of the Coptic diaspora in Washington who managed to propel a clip onto a popular Salafist TV station in Cairo, setting off riots across the Islamic world that drove up the clicks for the trailer on YouTube. Suddenly “Innocence of Muslims” was trending.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/opinion/18iht-edcohen-never-wrong-for-long.html?src=recg


Note: September 17, 2012