The notion of public journalism sounds good–that is the practice of citizens gathering and sharing information about local affairs.
And we will admit to being thoroughly impressed by a good number of citizen journalists. Our columnist Karin Parham is one. Karin is a bulldog. Whether you agree with her or you think she’s dead wrong, when she gets her teeth into a question, she digs.
But not all attempts at citizen journalism are equally good. We are thinking particularly of those who do not do their due diligence in vetting information before they publish it.
We saw an example of that in the last election. Rather than obtaining results from Columbia County election officials, the moderators of the Facebook page Columbia County Leadership Exposed posted election results from a site called Decision Desk HQ that were inaccurate.
Decision Desk HQ has a sound reputation as a generally reliable news source. Prominent national media such as Scripps News uses the company that MIT scholars have vetted and found to be top notch.
By the same token, Decision Desk HQ messed up in calling Seattle’s mayoral race, and they got some of Columbia County’s results wrong, too.
We are not faulting either Decision Desk HQ or the Columbia County Leadership Exposed page for the errors. Every one makes mistakes–who can forget the Dewy Defeats Truman heading from the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1948.
But such errors typically result from competitive pressures to be first with the results. And when that happens, news consumers have erroneous information that may result in premature calls for recounts or accusations of cheating, as happened in Columbia County.
Nothing much came of this concerns other than some elevated blood pressures. The county elections supervisor emailed the election results site with correct information the morning after the election, and their moderators made the needed corrections.
Still, we believe a better course is to hold off on making predictions or declaration based on information a machine gathered. It may take some time to get the official results, but correct information is worth waiting for.
