Lying sources

News sources aren't
required to tell the truth

Some people are very good liars, so good, in fact, that they get past the fact checking done by reporters and editors.

A prime example comes from Krystin Wiggs, a reporter for the Ahwatukee Foothills News, a newspaper in Arizona. Wiggs tells the story about a young man who was said to be an accomplished chef at a young age. An editor assigned her the story and she went to work.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t true.

Wiggs may have been a young reporter, but she did her job well. It’s just that Vinayak Gorur, the culinary student, was really good at deception and he convinced others, including his mother, to buy into his hoax and support his story.

Rarely are hoaxes this elaborate, but similar efforts to mislead reporters go on every day by people whose job it is to twist the news to their advantage. Call it spin, media management or whatever you like, it comes down to manipulation of information with the goal of convincing the public to see an issue in a way that's beneficial to an individual or group. It is intentional bias of the news.

Ideally reporters and editors would prevent suspicious information from getting into stories, but that's not as easy as it sounds.

Sometimes issues are so complicated that it's impractical to educate the viewer about problems with a source's comments without digressing from the original story. For example, if a member of Congress being interviewed about a proposed federal budget says Social Security is going broke in 10 years, that may be true under one analysis, but not under others. Discussing those other perspectives would take the reader too far away from a discussion of the budget which was the goal of the story.

For news consumers, the defense is to understand that there is a game afoot and to look for clues about how the news may be twisted. When a reporter interviews a source, ask yourself what stake that person, or her employer, has in the story. Keep in mind that it’s the reporter’s job to provide a balanced report, but that source may have been hired to do just the opposite.

Be skeptical and, if the issue is important to you, go to other news outlets to see what they have to say. Those other points of view will help you get to the truth.

See also:

"Experts" fake credentials to get on morning news shows

Mark McGuire manages the news to tell steroids story