Over the past week, the truth vigilante flap stirred up by New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane has sparked tremendous conversation, mostly concerning whether journalists should clarify when sources are probably lying.

This got me wondering: If a news organization decided to point out when sources spout inaccurate claims, HOW might this be accomplished? Specifically, which digital media tools might help news consumers notice and understand these problems more easily?

I asked some of the smartest people in digital media about this. Here are their ideas…

The first strategy, of course, is simply about how you write the story. A reporter or editor can insert clarifying text adjacent to claims or quotes presented in a news story. Here’s the example Brisbane offered in his initial post:

“Perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the president has a habit of apologizing for his country, the reporter should insert a paragraph saying, more or less:

‘The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words.’

Text cues in a story are a good way to call attention to the most egregious of falsehoods. This approach also has the considerable benefit of translating into print or broadcast media.

That’s a good first step, but let’s be realistic: It won’t scale well.

This is an election year, and politicians bend the truth about as often as they draw breath. So any news organization which attempts to adopt this editorial approach consistently would soon find that its campaign coverage devolves into an endless morass of qualifications and counterclaims.

If you plan to only shine a light on the worst untruths, another approach might be to create follow-up content. But if you’re going to this, do it in a way that gets noticed. Don’t write another deadly serious, boring he-said-she-said story that most people will skip. Try making it fun—and even potentially viral

Steve Buttry, Director of Community Engagement & Social Media for Digital First Media, observed: “The Daily Show does this well with video.”

He has a point: The Daily Show often points out lies—in a way that gets people laughing, and talking. And sharing. Word spreads, probably far more effectively than if such clarifications were buried in a straight news story.

Along this line, this week the NPR show On the Media revived its political comedy video series, Media Scrutiny Theater—starring the silhouettes and voices of hosts Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone. In the first episode, they’re wisecracking about a video ad made by Ron Paul supporters. (Does that format sound familiar? Oh, yeah.)

If you hope to be consistent about helping your audience sort fact from fiction (as well as wade through the vast gray areas which comprise most decisions about accuracy), that’s where digital tools and strategies might be more useful. Here are some suggestions from experts.

1. Fact check database. A news organization could build its own Politifact-style database and link to fact-checked claims there from within stories, á la Politifact. In 2010, Matt Waite, one of the creators of Politifact, explained how a you can roll your own Politifact.

Incidentally, Politifact does selectively partner with major news organizations in various states, which includes sharing its technical infrastructure and presenting your fact-checking content on Politifact.com. If your news organization is interested in joining this select group, contact PolitiFact editor Bill Adair. Waite noted that coalition proposals from multiple organizations are welcome, too.

2. Source links and annotations. These are a mainstay of Wikipedia but rare on mainstream news sites.

In response to my query this week, Matt Waite suggested that a simpler, less technical approach would be to present links on story pages that serve as footnotes or citations for fact checking or source material.

Waite offered this example:

“Like this: Sen. Smith said that American runs on the souls of children. However, data from X says Y. [source] (with link).

And yes, I mean [source]. Make it explicit that this link is to the source of this information. I think the Times does a lot of this during their reporting processes. But what they don’t do is make sourcing very explicit on the web page. I think doing that, with links, would go a long way.”

3. Visually highlighting claims that have been fact checked or that are questionable. Maybe the New York Times isn’t doing this yet, but last month ProPublica started experimenting with this approach. Check out their new Explore Sources feature. (Hat tip to Will Sullivan for bringing this to my attention.)

Al Shaw, news applications developer at ProPublica, explained how this feature works in this example story:

“Click the ‘ON’ button next to ‘Explore Sources’ at the beginning of the article. Words and phrases throughout the piece will turn yellow. Click these yellow highlights to see the portion of the source document from which Marshall got that fact. Once the annotation is visible, click the document image inside of the popup to go to the full document in DocumentCloud, or anywhere else to dismiss it.”

4. Crowdsourced fact checking. A big challenge in fact checking is simply the sheer amount labor it takes to check claims. How can a news organization keep up when beset by the inevitable swarm of questionable claims from political candidates?

In 2010 the nonprofit social news network Newstrust developed Truthsquad, a community fact-checking service that helps people verify the news online, with professional guidance. In a November 2010 MediaShift post, Newstrust founder Fabrice Florin explained how the system worked and what they learned from its initial field test.

This week, Florin told me, “Truthsquad.com provides a platform that could be used for what you’re looking for. We’re open sourcing the code at GitHub, if anyone wants to adapt it for the purposes you describe.”

This year TruthSquad has partnered with the Center for Public Integrity. The TruthSquad site notes:

“Together, we are developing a pro-am network to fact-check political claims during the 2012 elections—and aim to extend this small pilot site into a daily service by early 2012. By combining the Center’s newsroom of investigative journalists with our moderated crowd-sourcing service and contributions from our partners, we hope to provide daily fact-checks, as well as engage visitors as active participants to verify controversial claims.

“For now, you can help fact-check controversial statements from politicians, media pundits and public figures on this pilot site. Our editors have picked some dubious quotes below. Are they true or false? Each quote has links to related evidence, which we invite you to review as well. You are welcome to change your answer anytime, as you find more factual evidence.”

5. Story update notifications. Sometimes the facts change, or only become clear, after you publish a news story. Even if you correct a claim in the story, the problem remains: Who’s going to see it?

On a Google+ thread, Zac Thomas of Bite Communications suggested: “Online news stories can have an option with an ‘update me’ button that alerts the reader to an updated and fact checked version.”

Then, Michael Fitzhugh of The Burrill Report noted that Patch.com already seems to be doing this.

He noted: “There’s an example at the bottom of this story: Former Logan Teacher Arrested on Suspicion of Having Sex With Student. Because I was curious about how the feature is working for them, I opened this question on Quora: How successful is the AOL Patch “Keep me posted” feature?”

More ideas?

There are many ways digital media tools could help make the fact checking process more transparent, and also point out when sources are lying. We invite you to share your ideas in the comments below.

What’s the cost of not being a truth vigilante? It could cost you your credibility.

The widespread response to Brisbane’s post indicates that this kind of truthtelling is precisely what people expect news organizations to do. As Clay Shirky noted in The Guardian:

“This is not a hard question at all, considered from the readers’ perspective. Readers do not care about the epistemological differences between lies and weasel words; we want newspapers to limit the ability of politicians to make dubious assertions without penalty. Judging from the reactions to his post, most of us never understood that this wasn’t the newspapers’ self-conceived mission in the first place.”

IN PART 2 OF THIS SERIES, a note from the bleeding edge of digital media. Dan Schultz of the MIT Media Lab will explain how his Truth Goggles project might help news organizations create an online “context layer” of accuracy—and perhaps turn that into a new business opportunity.

The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The Knight Digital Media Center at USC is a partnership with the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. The Center is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

By Amy Gahran, 01/17/12 at 12:10 pm

Comments

Mr. Brisbane’s questions, which I suspect he knew the answers to, generated some necessary discussion. It’s an effective technique for getting information—pretend ignorance.
Other questions that might be discussed:
1. What is the news—what the candidate said or the fact that what he said is a lie?
2. When does the fact that a news source has lied—ie candidate in this discussion—become the news?
3. Is it ever justifiable to use a headline like “(Name of Candidate) lies during debate”
4. Should the speaker’s lies simply be left out of the report because they are lies? Can the lies be ignored if they are about irrelevant details?

5. Also, related, what developments are there for the archiving of digital news products? How often to archive? When to archive? To archive at all? Does every change made to a digital story need to be archived? Who’s responsibility is it to create, curate and maintain archives of digital products? Does every “citizen journalist” tweet that adds a bit of information require archiving?

By kentford, 01/18/12 at 8:40 am