Searching For News

Last weekend I received an email from a friend telling me about a bite-sized, video snack I might like to explore.  He called it a viral documentary.  Instead of just sending me the link, he appended an email he had received with a very detailed description of the issue which included a link to YouTube.

You may have received a similar email, it was about the plight of Eric Volz — or, should I say, the alleged plight of Eric Volz.

The email tells a story of a young American man sitting in a Nicaraguan jail accused and convicted of murdering his girlfriend.  The email was well written.  To save space here, I have posted it (unabridged) below.

The email, as you will see, is compelling and after reading it I did what you are going to do — I clicked the link and watched the viral documentary on YouTube.  It was not compelling nor was it convincing.  So much so, that I decided to do a quick Google search to see if I could find a trusted news source to corroborate the "facts."

I typed "Eric Volz" in quotes into the Google search bar.  The first search result was for www.friendsofericvolz.com which was mentioned in the email and, therefore, not useful.  The next search result was a blog entry on www.goodwillhinton.com.  I knew nothing about that site, but I clicked the link just to see.  It’s a blog with a bunch of positive comments about the injustice of the situation, but nothing on the site said "this is real."

Realizing that I had not used Google quite correctly for my purposes, I clicked the "news" link and first up (on March 24, 2007) was an article from Tennessean.com the self-proclaimed "#1 Online News Source" for middle Tennessee.  The story is pretty much what was articulated in the email, but the comments at the bottom of the story are truly astounding.  In fact, they are disturbing.  Reading this did nothing to help me understand what was really happening.  Then there was metafilter.com a pretty classic blog site with this disturbing posting:

What makes this case specifically different from all of the OTHER people who are in jail for crimes they didn’t commit?

This is what aggravates me about people with a cause - FREE THIS DUDE or whatever. Do you guys realize that the legal system in general is fucked up and there are, at any given time, an unacceptable number of people jailed for crimes that they didn’t commit? Why do you think that your dude specifically is a special snowflake? Wouldn’t it be a better use of time to campaign for better legal aid rather than FREE THAT GUY? And if your guy does get a reprieve, what then, are you done? Are you a one-trick pony of caring about shit?

Did you know that blogspot is free and a better forum to campaign for your cause of the week?

Posted by grapefruitmoon at 7:26 PM on March 22 [4 favorites]

Now I was starting to wonder.  Is this story real or is this another Lonelygirl15?  The unconvincing mini-documentary with some seriously heart-tugging scenes, the "friends of" site asking for donations — could this be an elaborate hoax?  Or, was it just sub-optimal execution and lack of netiquette.

After about 10 more minutes of rooting around the Internet, I found what I was looking for: a Wall Street Journal article from March 19, 2007 (five days earlier) which corroborated the facts as articulated in the original email and mentioned that Mike Poehlitz, a U.S. Embassy security officer, had been with Volz at his trial. For whatever reason, the WSJ article did not show up (at that time) in any of my Google searches. (No, I did not think to use any other search engine.  I wasn’t doing a research project; I was simply caught-up in a little Saturday morning mission to find news I could trust. Perhaps I should have done a search on WSJ or NYT or CNN first, but I didn’t. I use Google to search the Internet, which may say something about how I/we are conditioned to search.)

As a writer, I am very used to the process of researching and verifying sources of information that I distill, reprint or paraphrase in my work.  However, as a reader, other than considering the source, I have never really had to "verify" a news item before.

Perhaps you have had a similar experience in your personal news gathering.  I truly never have.  Which begs the question, "What if I relied on the comments from Middle Tennessee’s #1 Online News Source as my sole source?"  The story was completely one sided and the comments took anti-sentiment to an extreme.  Hummm…

After Middlebury College’s History Department banned Wikipedia as a reliable source (earlier this year), Penn and UCLA followed suit.  This really bothered me as I am a true believer in the "wisdom of crowds" and the value of Wikis.  Opponents of Wikipedia tell me that issue is not about the average accuracy of the information on Wiki, it’s about the reality that when the information is wrong (and not corrected or intentionally left wrong) it is really wrong.

I’m not an academic, so I’m not going to try too hard to argue for or against the validity of Wikis.  However, when I have asked experts in the blogosphere about the validity of blog entries and unedited comments, I have always been told that the system self regulates.  In fact, Jason Calacanis co-founder of Weblogs, Inc. has truly taken me to task on the subject.  He contends that the blogosphere is the most accurate environment on every subject and that nothing untrue can long survive there.

This is obviously, patently wrong.

Now we are entering (some would argue that we have been in one for a decade) a world where emails from friends with seemingly real news stories and seemingly real references may be casually passed along and consumed as facts.  We’ve always trusted our friends as good sources of info.  We’ve grown up (even the digital natives) in a world of trusted news brands — why shouldn’t we be conditioned to believe what we read if formatted like news, is, in fact, news?

This is just the beginning.  UGC as video content has made all the news this year, but the real story is just bubbling under the surface.  The moulin of user generated news is about the seep under the branded news glaciers we believe will never melt or fall into the sea.  Let’s just hope the melting ice doesn’t redraw the map to the point where we won’t recognize the coastline.