Yesterday the internet was a buzz about the apparent death of legendary Canadian singer Gordon Lightfoot. These reports began on Twitter yesterday afternoon and quickly spread across the site. The speculation became so much that CanWest News picked up the story and reported it on several of their news sites. Once picked up by a “legitimate” news source, the reports began to spread rapidly.
However, Gordon Lightfoot was alive and well, on his way to the dentist office, when he heard a report on the radio that he was dead. The original reports are now being called a prank. This is not the first time that celebrities have been falsely reported as dead on Twitter. While Twitter has proven an impressive force in instantaneously spreading information across the globe, what is the affect it can have on the false information that gets picked up? While news sites have an obligation to retract stories, and will probably delete the original report (whether out of accuracy or embarrassment), Twitter users do not have that obligation and Twitter is much harder to control.
Now, it is not confirmed that it strictly was a Tweet that CanWest went off of in their reporting of Lightfoot’s death, but wouldn’t it be standard procedure for a journalist to contact a representative for Lightfoot to find out from the source? As we have discussed in class, there is a debate about the idea of blogs being journalism. While this story shows the lack of accountability that can be present on the internet, how much credibility can journalism give itself when it relies on random internet sources? Are journalists acting any differently than those who post online?
Farewell, but not Goodbye!
14 years ago
