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SMS + organ theft = news?
Canadian journalist Saleem Khan, writing for TheFeature.com, reports on a story published in The Manila Standard in the Philippines which "touched off a wave of panic with a front page story Monday, telling of the discovery of the bodies of 5 children dumped along roadsides, gutted of their hearts, livers, kidneys". Of interest to this column, apparently, the reporter who broke the story received the details as a text message on his mobile phone. I turned out to be a hoax. "The "culprit of this hoax" admitted he made up the story and had sent it to a reporter in a mobile phone text message as a joke. The way in which this media frenzy unfolded raises serious questions about the impact of mobile phones on news reporting. In what seems to be a rush to print on a sensationalistic story -- presumably from a source the reporter trusted -- the Manila Standard abdicated its role as a gatekeeper and clearly failed to practise one of the most basic rules of journalism: Check your facts. That isn't to say that mobile phones and other new technologies CAN'T be reliable news sources. Word of the SARS outbreak first spread in SMS messages. But if traditional news media continue to break with the standards and practices of good journalism in a race to compete with new media that serve a different niche, they will erode the public trust and thereby render themselves extinct by virtue of their eventual unreliability." |
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BULK SMS GATEWAY