Bad and inaccurate information from websites isn’t new, and it isn’t something that just happens with media news reporters. The Internet can be a fabulous tool, but it should not be the sole source of information for any factual writing, from blogs to research for fiction, to magazine or newspaper articles.
Anyone can create a website and fill it with text. There’s never a guarantee that information online is accurate or current. That’s why writers and journalists can get into dire straits by relying solely on the Internet for the basis of their content.
Here’s a dead-on example of what can happen if a writer sucks information out of a website and spits it out as fact, never bothering to make a verification phone call or send an email to a primary source.
The unfortunate death of Maurice Jarre
Once upon a time, a guy with a website thought he’d do something silly to see if media would bite an attractive lure. On an encyclopedic website (yes, that really big one), Shane Fitzgerald of Dublin posted bogus information about a well-known Frenchman — movie music composer, Maurice Jarre.
Fitzgerald made up a deep, thoughtful comment that he figured Jarre might have actually said about life.
“Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear.” — not said by Jarre.
Unfortunately for some professional journalists, Jarre never actually uttered the words in question. Fitzgerald made up the whole thing as pure fiction. He was eager to see how people, including Jarre, would respond.
Then Jarre died.
How bloggers and journalists fell into the ‘net
It seems a couple of journalists needed filler for their pieces about Jarre’s passing. So off they went to you-know-what-ipedia, looked the old fellow up, and cut and pasted the pithy comment that Fitz had added to the encyclopedia. Not just blogs, but major newspapers and blogs in the United States, England, and India used the quote in their Jarre obituaries and articles, quoting as though Jarre had actually said the words. Ooops. None of them cited the secondary source where they got the quote — they just attributed it to Jarre. Remember, he never said it.
Later, Fitz fessed up and told the story of his experiment.
Primary vs secondary sources — the difference matters
As a writer, you must understand primary and secondary sources. A primary source is the clichéd horse’s mouth. It’s the woman who pontificated the idea; the man who discovered the discovery. You’re obligated to find their phone number and dial them up to check the fact. Or send an email. You ask direct questions and receive direct answers, which you can quote without making any alterations or you can paraphrase if you indicate the paraphrasing. That’s how to ensure that you have quoted accurately.
A secondary source is not the original. Secondary is a he said or she thought kind of source wherein someone heard, or read, or decided what the original utterance or action was. Secondary is Wikipedia, Facebook (don’t count on it to be true), a magazine article or website that printed the quote, and so forth. You can see clearly how facts get diluted here, right? Did George Washington cut down the tree he allegedly took out? Nope. He did not. Someone thought it was a cool story, so they told two people and so on.
When you decide to use secondary sources, identify the information as such. For example, in a story I might write, Stephen Colbert mocked the religious far right. According to a story from HuffPost, “Colbert then mocked the religious right with a fake quote from Jesus: ‘For I was hungry and you said, Hey, who gave you that free food? Slap that fish out of his dirty little mouth!’ “
Colbert did not make this remark to me personally, and I was not in the room where he said it, so I don’t have a primary source quote. Some writers would simply say Stephen Colbert mocked the religious right…” and copy the entire remark. But the writer would be obligated to stipulate that they took the anecdote from another publication. To follow best practices, the writer would link the quote back to HuffPost. Doing that never makes the author sound less authoritative; it simply underscores the writer’s respect for truth and for other people’s work.
Must bloggers abandon Internet resources?
If you choose to get your lead from the Internet or you’re surfing for a story idea, fine. Mull over what you uncover online. But before you present a fact as a fact — whether you’re a blogger, a Pulitzer winner, a stringer, a novelist, or a freelancer — your obligation is to verify facts you present as facts. Find the horse and get him to whinny at you. Otherwise, folks, you don’t know he actually whinnied — it’s just hearsay. Sure, print what you cull from websites, but say, “I culled this from a website.”
Do that, and you can call yourself a professional writer of blogs, stories, articles, or columns. Anything less, and you don’t even deserve the pennies per article some writers settle for in today’s markets. And that is, of course, why writers and journalists should not rely solely on the Internet — reach out and take the extra time to verify your information.
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Good stuff, Maryan.
I'm pretty careful about sourcing. The main reason I do it the way you describe how to do it is that it puts the accountability onto the source. In other words, if I quote Wikipedia and Wikipedia is wrong, it's on them, but my readers at least know where I got my info.
I'm not a reporter, so I rely on internet sources for 99.99% of my information. It can be tricky with my kind of posts, because they're heavily opinionated. That means that the thing I'm complaining about in a post (I complain a lot these days) has to be based on facts. If I complain about, for example, all the bees in the world being extinct because I saw it somewhere on the interwebs, my next complaint will fall on deaf ears (or, should I say, more deaf ears than usual).
So if the quote or info from a source is central to the theme of the rant, I double and triple check to see if the original info is valid.
Regarding Wikipedia specifically, I tend to find my way there after I've found information somewhere else, because Wikipedia is crowd-sourced. But it's still a very useful tool, IMO, but mostly as a confirmation source or as a provider of background info.
The thing to do is to have people study the difference in these documentations OFFLINE first...