ABC has discovered it may need to set rules around Twitter and its newsroom.
ABC reporters overheard Obama call rapper Kanye West a jackass during an off-the-record chat Obama was having with CNBC. Obama was criticising an outburst Kanye had at the MTV Video Music Awards, where he interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech to say he thought Beyonce deserved the award.
Obama made the comment not strictly off-the-record, but during the pre-chatter before an interview on CNBC – which is considered kind of off-the-record. Chumps from ABC overheard the comments through a fibre optic line the network shares with CNBC, one of the chumps tweeted:
“Pres Obama just called Kanye West a ‘jackass’ for his outburst at VMAs when Taylor Swift won. Now THAT’S presidential.”
Nuttiness ensued. The Whitehouse had no comment.
The question this beckons is what kind of guidelines journalists may need in the newsroom around social media like twitter.
Twitter, a technology that’s a natural tool for reporters who love to tell people what they know whenever they know it, has raced ahead in usage before many news organisations have developed policies to govern its use, said Richard Wald, a former ABC News executive and professor at Columbia University.
“You need to reinforce the sense that you have to verify before you publish,” Wald said. “The policies may be very comprehensive, but they may not be adequate to the technology that news organisations have.”
Lets be sceptical for a moment and not buy into new media paranoia: is this a typical scenario that could pop up with any story that is poorly fact checked? Or, as Wald suggests is Twitter, with its speed, rapid dissemination, and easy digestibility, opening up a whole new can of worms?
