4 Sep, 2008
Ethics in journalism and the Metcalfe law
Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (2) Comments
I, alongwith my team, have spent the last two full days in fire-fighting, false and inaccurate, libelous and defamatory claims against Directi by a certain Garth Bruen at Knujon and Jart Armin and James Mcquad at Hostexploit, compounded multifold thanks to the Network effect of the Internet.
For the full story check out our post on the Directi blog – Our official response to inaccurate reports which falsely implicate the Directi Group
In short, Knujon and HostExploit published two independent online reports incorrectly linking Directi to certain miscreants responsible for fraudulent activities on the Internet. Their research was entirely flawed and their reports filled with factual inaccuracies.
Within record time, these posts were picked up by over 15 other news sites and reported as if accurate with additional conclusions left to the imagination of the respective journalists. What shocked me personally is neither the original posters (Garth / Jart / James) nor any of the journalists responsible for the follow-up aftermath extended a basic common courtesy of contacting us for comments, let alone for validating any of the claims. The whole episode has caused considerable irreversible damage to our reputation, ended up wasting significant resources within our organization, and left several misconceptions in the minds of thousands of readers worldwide concerning abuse on the Internet.
Journalism has existed way before the Internet, and a common ethical code of responsible reporting is assumed in this profession. With the Internet however the responsibility is significantly compounded, given the fact that any published story is now re-published multiple times, blogged about, indexed, archived, forwarded, shared, favorited, bookmarked, dugg, twitterred within moments of publication, repeatedly, by netizens worldwide, and all this information continues to exist in the cyberspace, google cache, browser cache, proxies, web archives, offline stores and many other sources – ad infinitum.
Anyone making any public claims / statements on the Internet now has significant power, and, in the words of Peter Parker – “With great power comes great responsibility”. I can only hope that the various reporters / news agencies who we have been in touch with, learn from this experience, and do not, in their haste to churn out the next sensational news story, ignore the fundamental tenets of responsible and ethical reporting.
