Don’t check your sources, just believe everything.
March 20, 2007 Outbursts No CommentsNBC Nightly News last night featured a segment about the recent publicity storm surrounding the anti-Hillary Clinton ‘1984′ ad running on YouTube. In the segment, NBC made the video out to be a work of ‘professional’ quality, into which someone must have put ‘a lot of money and effort.’ The potential harmful effects of the video were discussed, as it was argued that the presence of ‘BarackObama.com‘ at the end of the clip would cause people to believe that the movie was the work of Obama’s official campaign.
Hearing newspeople decrying the difficulty of verifying a source makes me pretty sick, if not all that surprised in this day and age. Let’s study the evidence:
If you just look closely, you’ll see that the end of the video merely lists Obama’s website. It makes no attempt to indicate that the work is copyrighted by Obama’s campaign, or in any way affiliated with it. For all intents and purposes, it could be the URL for this website listed there (oh, how I wish). That wouldn’t make it my work. Also, the idea that the video was commercially produced through a significant effort of time and money is ludicrous. Anyone with the least bit of familiarity with digital video can tell that the only effect used is a simple matte where Hillary’s face replaces the one in the original commercial. Everything else is stock. The video could’ve been made (and probably was) in under a day, using only the free iMovie software available on any Mac.
In other words, this video is the digital equivalent of the handwritten notes you forged from your parents so you could skip school. And yet, national journalists are hailing it as another potential pitfall into which even the most erstwhile, fact-checking young Peter Parker might stumble. The amount of ignorance that surrounds virtual communities like YouTube is appalling–so much so that we’ve forgotten everything we’ve ever supposedly been taught in school about checking your sources for accuracy and veracity, and are now willing to believe something just because somebody with the YouTube username ’speechprofessor’ decided to (sort of) claim it was an official Obama spot. It used to be you could count on your news anchors to sift through the piles of evidence and unearth the gem of truth. Now it just seems they’re willing to grab any chunk of shit in those piles, as long as it’s been labeled ‘gem.’ Makes you wonder how they handle the actually ambiguous stories…