In defense of viral bullshit (sort of)
How different is Bat Boy from running stories about Donald Trump’s presidential “campaigns?”
Follow the bouncing meme: T-shirt seller FCKH8 posts a photo it says it got from a supporter, supposedly of a man’s letter to his daughter, disowning her for disowning her gay son. Photo of letter starts to go viral, triggering post by Gawker. In comments underneath, Gawker owner Nick Denton and editor John Cook disagree about provenance of letter and get into discussion of verification. Matthew Ingram covers the comment discussion on paidcontent. Jeff Jarvis on Medium writes about Ingram writing about Gawker writing about FCKH8 and says: “Journalism used to be subsidized by classifieds and fluff, now it is built atop viral bullshit.”
My turn.
Despite the headline on this post, I’m not really here to defend the value of stories too good to check. What I’m defending is their heritage.
Jarvis implies that media sites’ use of viral BS is a step on a slippery slope to oblivion. I would put that argument in the same circular file with the claims that the “mainstream media” is dying because it’s too liberal and that newspapers are hurt because they ignore good news and focus on the bad. They’re not just wrong in their conclusions, they’re wrong in their premises. In the case of viral BS: The implication that it’s a new thing is ludicrous.
Just a few months over 30 years ago, I joined the Detroit Free Press as a copy editor in a hiring boom linked to, among other things, the start of an afternoon “bulldog” edition designed to sap some readers from the then-PM Detroit News. Working the bulldog was a lot like working on the online side of The Plain Dealer a few years ago: Hardly anyone else in the newsroom was paying attention to what we were doing, for good and ill.
The editor put in charge of the bulldog was a genial old-school guy who didn’t take things too seriously. Our front page sprouted pastel-colored screens over stories and other elements that were the print equivalent of the “blink” tag online. Because the reporters continued to work on the regular print deadlines, we didn’t have much local copy to work with. I remember one wire short in particular that landed in my electronic in-box. It stank of BS and I brought it to the editor’s attention — knowing that he was the guy who’d plucked it for the front page in the first place. Surely, I said, this thing isn’t true. But, he said, it’s fun. We ran it.
Around the same time, former Nixon press secretary Ron Nessen wrote a novel called “The Hour” that includes this passage:
“You ever hear that newsroom expression ‘too good to check’?”
Pam recalled the version of that cynical expression printed on a plaque in Irv’s office: “Facts can spoil a good story.”
But that’s just going back to near the dawn of my career. Stories too good to check have been a bedrock of journalism ever since there was journalism. They haven’t killed the industry yet.
Am I a fan of TGTC stories? Nah. But that’s mostly because publishing them requires journalists to adopt the pretense of gullibility. Ingram gets at this in his report:
Zimmerman [author of Gawker’s grandpa letter story] described one recent post about a firefighter rescuing a kitten from a burning building. The kitten later died — a fact the Gawker writer included. But that “damaged the virality” of the post, he says. “You really can’t have it both ways when it comes to viral content. If you want to capitalize on its sharing prowess and reap the PVs that come with that, then you simply can’t take a hard-boiled approach to fluff. People are just not going to share a cat video of a dead cat.”
Zimmerman’s post on the letter did include the adverb “purportedly,” one of those words journalists throw in to say “I’m not really this stupid.” Clearly, he isn’t. As the comments from Cook underneath the post indicate, he was doing what he’s paid to do — find out what people are talking about, and try to grab some of that conversation to Gawker.
That’s not a noble role to play. But as I wrote earlier this week, journalists are not on a mission from God. Before you scorn Zimmerman for writing about the grandpa letter, take a look at how much gets into news media that’s too good to check. Not just fluffy stuff: The trial balloons politicians float, the grandstanding we report as if it were worth something, the urban development schemes that we know will never get done.
TGTC stories offend me intellectually, but they don’t portend the End of Truth. If telling stories too good to check really was a death warrant, there wouldn’t be many religions extant, would there?