Sex, Lies and Video Games

There was sex, crime, comedy, teenage rebellion, video gaming references and a certain wacky "urban legend" preposterousness that made it perfect fodder for the target audience of nerds, bloggers and social news sites who would then disseminate it into the mainstream.

And as experiments go it was a damn successful one. Within days the story had spread like wildfire across the web appearing on more than 2,000 websites, ascending the ranks of social news websites such as Digg and attracting 450,000 to the money.co.uk site to read the article.

It was only later, when a curious reporter contacted the Texan police department in question to uncover further details about the story, that the hoax was finally uncovered.

By this point several media organisations including The Sun, Fox News and Radio One had all recounted it as fact. This is the part of the story which got me a little bit twitchy from the perspective of a professional researcher.

You see, back when I was a clueless new entrant to the TV industry, I had it drummed into me by my series producers that any statement made on screen had to 100% legal-proof or I be flayed alive by hoards of rabid lawyers baying for litigation.

As a general rule of thumb this meant, if we wanted to report anything as fact, we would either have to have first hand proof or find three published sources that had successfully made the same claim before us without getting sued.

Now pardon me if I'm wrong, but The Sun, Fox News and Radio One certainly count as published sources in my book and, as a naïve young researcher, this would have been all the evidence I would have needed to unwittingly weave a bogus story thread into a broadcast programme and subsequently hand Ofcom my arse on a plate.

Now, this is obviously a case of lazy journalism on behalf of the media outlets who published the account as fact and it may seem like overkill to labour the point with such a silly story. It is, however, brilliantly indicative of a problem that the modern media researcher has to face- just how can you sort fact from fiction on the web?

Whilst any researcher worth his salt would never rely on the word of a random blog he had Googled without checking the sources, it does raise a pertinent question about just what does count as an "official" or "published" source these days anyway.

Take this post you're currently reading for example. It is an officially sanctioned blog by a respected local newspaper. It appears under a big fat banner that reads "Birmingham Post" which you would expect would give it some degree of gravitas, and it is just a few clicks away from the "news" section of the website which doesn't look wholly dissimilar to the blog section. We even have a section labelled "news blogs" which muddies the water even further.

However, I'm not a professional journalist nor do I pretend to be. Everything you read here I've stumbled across on the web and noted down because I think it's interesting. As a reader, however, you have no way of knowing whether I spent several hours painstakingly researching it or whether I knocked it up in 15 minutes on my lunch break. And as I'm not bound by a journalistic code of ethics, I don't really have to tell you either way.

But if I write articles in an authoritative style, creating content that appears on the official website of a trusted media outlet, shouldn't that content be considered as "journalism" that has been "published" by the Birmingham Post?

Undoubtedly the creative and professional debate surrounding blogging being labelled as journalism is a contentious topic that is guaranteed to raise the hackles of many traditional journalists. From a legal perspective, however, I'm pretty sure the newspaper would be held just as responsible for the publication of a dodgy blog post as it would for a badly researched article by one of its newsroom staff.

And if it's good enough for the lawyers to label as an official publication then presumably it should be good enough for a hapless junior TV researcher desperately looking for "reliable" sources whilst his producer is breathing down his neck?

The minefield of truth becomes even more peppered with the unexploded ordinance of litigation when you analyse the mechanics of the blogosphere.

Here is a platform where turnover is fast and the attention span is low. To get mass attention quickly (and by that I mean spontaneous viral attention not a loyal following built over time) stories either have to be sensational or they have to break the news first before the competition gets a look in.

These are hardly conditions that lend themselves naturally to extensive fact-checking and, as breaches of truth aren't exactly newsworthy or PR-friendly for the erring blogger, mistakes are distinctly under-reported compared to the noise-making stories that cause them in the first place.

Also, if you add the echo-chamber effect where blog posts refer to other blog posts (just as this one is doing) and the fact that stories remain archived and searchable for many years to come, it is easy to get lulled into believing that a story is true simply because it is everywhere.

As we can see in the case of fictitious teenage playboy Ralph Hardy, all it takes is one piece of naïve or reckless publication by someone at an apparently "reliable" source to open the floodgates for others to follow in their wake. Soon, the story gets cited in other trusted sources, amplifying the effect until a piece of fabrication snowballs itself into "truth".

As someone who has been employed to both generate attention-grabbing online media content and to fact-check stuff for broadcast, I can see both sides of this story.

Marketers are getting more and more sophisticated at figuring how to push those attention-grabbing buttons so researchers need to wise up accordingly or wind up with egg on their faces.

Whilst my inner web geek is smirking along with the viral marketers, the professional fact hunter in me is nervously reaching for the valium.