The great divide between fact and fiction in the newsroom hit another mark today as The Kingsport Times-News reports on a news feature that appeared on Johnson City’s CBS affiliate WJHL and Tri-Cities.com. It’s not uncommon for WJHL to sensationalize the news from “Stormtrackers” and “Viper Radar” and it looks like someone didn’t check the facts.
Evidently, there was an email scare a couple of years ago that talked about how would be stalkers were posting notes on cars to set up victims for a car-jacking. You know the ones…the email that your mom or your friends send you that rank up there with chain-letters? Anyway, I didn’t think much of the story until Jeff Bobo did a little research on his own and evidently, the local reporters covering this story took an urban legend and reported it as fact using resources from Florida.
Hmmm. I guess one could cite the second paragraph that states, ‘it’s not happening here in the Tri-Cities,” but that begs another question. Why report it?
Mass media and traditional news sources are facing a real threat with bloggers and other grass-roots fact checkers who still respect accurate journalism and as the divide widens, it’s going to be more important now than ever before to get the facts straight and maintain credibility.
Here’s the lead story and check out the ‘dramatized photo.”
