Any responsible writer should know right off the bat that Twitter is not a legitimate news source. For me, it took the massive error of erroneously reporting Chris Henry‘s death before I learned that frankly obvious lesson.
After (at the time) three years writing for this website and multiple decades with a working brain, I should have known better. It was an inexcusable mistake. For the past two years, I have taken great pains to avoid using Twitter as a source in any of my reports, unless I had confirmation from a legitimate source. I have also avoided citing mainstream news stories whose only news source is Twitter, a policy that was proven prudent by tonight’s events.
Unfortunately, I was careless tonight. CBS Sports reported Joe Paterno‘s death late this evening and I cited their report without first checking to see where they got their information. Indeed, the only source cited by CBS was the unverified Twitter account of the Onward State student newspaper at Penn State University. Onward State got it wrong and CBS sent that information across the country. After two years of being careful, I made another massive error, citing CBS and again falsely reporting someone’s death.
As I wrote earlier, the responsibility here is mine. Even though CBS did not explicitly cite Onward State, I should have noticed that the report contained a hyperlink back to the Onward State Twitter account under the words ‘has died’. Having said that, perhaps this is an opportunity to reiterate something that should be obvious: Twitter is not and will never be a news source.
There are those who will say that the blame should fall on the reporters who run with false information, and not on Twitter. That may be true, but my general presumption after the Henry debacle is that just about anything posted on Twitter should be presumed false. For one, you do not know who is running any given Twitter account, and many media accounts are unverified. Even the verified accounts may have been hacked. In addition, I am generally of the mind that a report that is good enough for Twitter but not good enough to be reported on an organization’s actual website is not worth using as a source.
The Onward State site has been difficult to access for most of the night, and it was not immediately possible to confirm whether the organization had ever published an actual story on Paterno’s death, as opposed to the tweet. Not that the story would have been markedly different if CBS had cited the Onward State website instead of Twitter, but using a tweet as the basis of such a story involving life and death is especially irresponsible — take it from someone who knows.
Frankly, CBS was more irresponsible in reporting this story than Onward State. If one is to believe their initial Twitter report, Onward State actually had their own sources in reporting Paterno’s death. They were wrong, and the newspaper’s managing editor has since resigned. However, it is one thing to be wrong because your sources led you astray; it is another thing to be wrong because you had no sources, and you were piggybacking off of a 140-character report.
I am not going to try and stake out any moral high ground here; as I have stated before, I have no leg to stand on in that regard. Still, it may be worthwhile to suggest that media organizations avoid using Twitter as a sole source in the future.
(Information on Onward State resignation from Onward State website; additional information from Poynter Institute)
