LONDON — It should be the moment of truth for the mainstream media. Literally. But it seems to have all the makings of a perfect storm, from London to Gaza to Jerusalem.
Just as a new world of tweets and blogs whips up a blizzard of unchecked and sometimes uncheckable information, the Internet itself has created the most severe economic challenge in decades to traditional news outlets, and to newspapers in particular.
And, as costs are cut by downsizing, so, too, are the skills and resources to distill the welter of rumor and rant into something approaching fact.
At the British Broadcasting Corp., embroiled in a sexual abuse scandal, a flawed investigation into misconduct by a British politician ended in recrimination and lawsuits last week after unverified and false accusations had filtered from the flagship “Newsnight” current affairs program into the Twittersphere.
The BBC settled out of court for £185,000, or about $ 295,000, with the former Conservative Party treasurer Alistair McAlpine, who had been implicated but not identified by name in a segment that inspired several high-profile aficionados of Twitter to pass on the falsehood to tens of thousands of followers. Now, like the old media so often derided by practitioners of the new, they face the threat of lawsuits.
“I helped to stoke an atmosphere of febrile innuendo around an innocent man,” one of them, the columnist and writer George Monbiot, said on his Web site , “and I am desperately sorry for the harm I have done him.”
All this is happening as many in Britain say they fear that the Leveson Inquiry into the practices of British newspapers will lead to statutory regulation not only of the tabloids under scrutiny in the phone-hacking scandal but also of the British national press in general, further restricting the ability to speak truth — that word again — to power.
That is what makes the storm so perfect.
Some of these considerations emerged as the bloody events unfolded in Gaza, chronicled in pages like those of the International Herald Tribune, by courageous journalists risking their lives to report from the scene of rocket attacks in southern Israel and airstrikes in Gaza itself.
But alongside the real war, a separate cyberbattle played out on Twitter, where the Israel Defense Forces and the military wing of the militant Hamas groups sought to mold the narrative, bypassing traditional journalism. Early Monday, the I.D.F. had attracted almost 180,000 followers to @idfspokesperson while the militant @AlqassamBrigade had garnered nearly 32,000.
Clearly, the Twitter messages offer a remarkable insight into rival worlds, reflecting the region’s ability to spawn many versions: a “surgical targeting” for the I.D.F. turned into the “horrifying result” of an Israeli airstrike for those supporting the Hamas view.
Surely, too, the messages contributed to the greater knowledge, adding to the available wealth of sources from television footage, newspapers, wire services or radio broadcasts on the ground.
But what if the 140-character missives are plain wrong, as in the case of Lord McAlpine? What if technology opens this somber universe to impostors, bogus tweeters hiding behind false identities? What if the supposed dissemination of truth is merely a front for the manipulation of opinion — the alchemy sought by propagandists for centuries? Cyberspace generally shuns policing, so who will make the judgment calls about what, for want of a better term, constitutes good taste and decency?
War reporting has always produced partisan accounts alongside the striving for objectivity. But, with both sides turning social media Web sites into weapons in their long-running struggle, some were left feeling queasy.
“There is something grotesque and disturbing about two parties with a long history of conflict live-narrating the launching of bombs that kill civilians and destroy communities,” Jessica Roy, a reporter for Betabeat , a technology blog operated by The New York Observer. “There is no empowerment or revolution here: just a dark, sinking feeling as we watch the bloodshed unfold in real time.”
(That sentiment surfaced at a weekend dinner party in North London, where a guest displayed a smartphone’s ability to display I.D.F. feeds of the cockpit view of airstrikes in Gaza, offering the assembly of three-course generals the perfect dessert storm.)
From one perspective, the uncertainties surrounding the role of the Web in war reporting should be an opportunity for renewal rather than a threat to traditional journalism, allowing the so-called mainstream media to reclaim their onetime mantle as interpreters of events.
But that only works if traditional journalism is able to straighten out the facts that cyberspace warps. And that costs money.
“Nobody who works for a newspaper can afford to be complacent,” the columnist Ian Jack wrote in The Guardian, discussing the impact of personnel reductions.
“In this fracturing and fragmenting of old workplaces, more than comradeship is being lost,” he said. “Error is on the loose.”
Letter From Europe: A Growing Void Where Facts Were Once Checked
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