Daughter of the Ring of Fire » Blog Archive » The Panic on the Potomac and Media Rumors

Sep

2009

The Panic on the Potomac and Media Rumors

Posted on 07:07, September 12th, 2009 by EKSwitaj

Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

: Image by Getty Images via Daylife

We’ve all heard about the potential for rumors to spread rapidly through social media, especially Twitter, and you’ve probably seen a false report of a celebrity death or two if you’re at all active in the same. As yesterday’s panic on the Potomac shows us, however, it isn’t only online media that is vulnerable to mistaken reporting. When networks run with unsubstantiated reports, however, the effect is quite different from when such things are spread primarily by citizen reporters tweeting.

Because supposedly reliable news agencies, starting with CNN, were reporting gunshots fired, the DC police department rushed to the scene, while flights at Reagan National Airport were grounded. I’m not sure that a trending topic on Twitter would have had such an impact, yet rumors instigated through Twitter tend to get fact-checked rather quickly through @ replies looking for verifiable sources.

If someone saying “bang bang” over a loudspeaker had started off a rumor about gunfire that was confined to social media, we would all be having a good laugh right now about how silly people were to confuse the two and how gullible the people who passed the story on were. Instead we’re getting a lot of talking-head outrage about the Coast Guard training on 9/11 and letters from networks justifying their coverage decisions. The coast guard is reviewing their procedures.

Now, maybe the Coast Guard should have been more sensitive to people’s fears. That said, the story shows the speciousness of arguing against social media as an information source because it is vulnerable to false information. It also calls into question how we decide which misinterpretations should be anticipated or, failing that, taken seriously.