So, today's drama on the ever-unfolding soap opera that is the internet, is that some American guy living in Edinburgh has been lying about being a Syrian lesbian. People lie about all kinds of weird shit on the internet, I guess; you've got that old equation of rational person + audience + anonymity = raving shitbag. Trolls, as they are otherwise known on message boards and the like, who exist to stir up trouble, entirely for their own, rather strange, amusement. The thing is, quite a lot of people were taken in by this particular troll. He kept up his weird fantasy of being a lesbian in Syria for several months, and then dramatically killed off his character by having her abducted by the secret police. After a short frenzy of attention, a girl in London came forward and pointed out that the picture on the blog of the Syrian lesbian was in fact her - and the lies came toppling down like dominoes.
This, right here, is why the traditional media is going to survive against the internet. Information coming from, say, the BBC or even Sky has to be first of all verified and then ordered in a rational fashion. The internet is just this bloody great ocean of information - it takes a discerning eye to pick out the fish. Even then, you're half as likely to pull out a welly.
It's because there's absolutely no consequence to lying on the internet; you can say literally whatever you like on Twitter or your blog or whatever, with no real risk of censure. That's why people are still going to come to news organisations to get their news - while their veracity is not always entirely guaranteed, you can have a hell of a lot more faith in them than in the raw, unfiltered torrent of information that is the internet.
Fair enough, not all media organisations are moderated that fully - Richard Desmond's newspapers, for example, just don't bother with the PCC, which is something I'd like to see rectified as soon and as violently as possible. A stronger media watchdog ensures better journalism all round. But as I say, absolutely nothing is going to happen to Attention Seeking American A, the idiot who wrote this blog supposedly with good intentions. Maybe he really did think he was promoting the cause of that under-sold demographic, the Syrian lesbian, but I'd wager dollars to doughnuts in the main he was getting a kick off the publicity, the attention. Why else would he 'kill off' his character in the way that he did? Putting up stolen pictures of someone who clearly uses the internet enough to put her face on it was just asking to get caught. And now he's got himself some notoriety - but he's done immense damage to real Syrian bloggers. He's cried wolf, and relation to a situation where people really are getting eaten by wolves. Ordinary people are abducted daily by the repressive regime in Syria, but an element of doubt has now been introduced about the real cases; christ, I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up running on state television over there. I wonder if he got his motivation from Season 5 of The Wire, where McNulty invents a serial killer to get money redirected to the police, which he then distributes to be spent solving real murders. Technically a noble cause, but one which is recognised in the end by all to be Wrong.
Which brings me back to the point I started at - people will not brook being lied to. The whole foundation of journalism is based on trust - trust between the reader and the writer, and between the journalist and his sources. Incidences like this remind us that Twitter and blogs and so on are not real journalism, in that you can't really trust them. A Washington Post sports journalist underlined this at the start of the last NFL season, by tweeting some lies, ostensibly to prove a point - although he proved it rather too well, as his position as a trusted source away from twitter, which meant several real news organisations picked up on the story and ran with it. THEY had to print corrections - the liar in question just deleted his Twitter. He was suspended by the Post, though, once again emphasising how there are consequences to lying in the real media, whereas there are none in the New media. This is why I still get my news from the BBC, and buy a newspaper most days. They might not have the instantaneous payoff of Twitter or Google Realtime, but they collect together all the true stories, and arrange them in a rational and readable order. Until the internet can find some way of sifting the bullshit from the truth, it's never going to usurp the true media, the Fourth Estate, of its position as the bearers of news.
