Fiction becomes fact at pseudo news sites

Richard Hayes Phillips of Canton recently published on-line an article that is to journalism what the Blair Witch Project was to cinema: Scary and presented in a way that makes it seem true.

But you knew the movie – even though pretending to be a documentary – was all in good fun. It was entertainment. The piece by Phillips was published on something pretending to be a legitimate news Web site. So if you read his article detailing serious flaws in St. Lawrence County vote counting after the recent elections, you might be led to think it was true. The problem is it wasn't.

In a nut, the rambling piece of pseudo-journalism used lots of numbers and data to say that there were more votes than voters who cast them in the 23rd Congressional District race. That truly would have been big news were it true. It wasn't. Phillips mixed and matched certified results with unofficial results and came up with his incorrect conclusions.

He made a human error. That's pretty entertaining if you consider the point he was trying to make in his piece was that the computerized voting machines were the problem in this election. And they were a problem. They froze up. They slowed the process of counting votes. But there's no evidence so far that shows bugs in the machines tainted election results. At least no evidence that includes facts, which are usually pretty important to a news story.

The scary part of all this is not that Phillips got it wrong ... it's that he got it wrong on something masquerading as a credible news Web site. It has the banner masthead you might see on a real newspaper. It runs wire service stories provided by legitimate news-gathering organizations. You might think by reading it that it strives to meet standards developed by real journalists and real news organizations over the years. The problem is it doesn't.

It is a problem because we are in an age when Web sites by honest-to-goodness news organizations are becoming more prevalent in the world of journalism. These organizations apply the same standards of fairness, accuracy and other journalistic tenets to the electronic product as they did when they were only providing news on paper or on television. The sites that are not real news organizations but play them on the Internet threaten the credibility of all the legitimate sites when they pump out a product for no other reason but to make a few bucks.

A butcher, baker or candlestick maker with a personal computer can fabricate these sites as easy pie - or hamburger or candles, for that matter. And by looking like a real news product they can trick some people into buying advertising. Pretty soon, they look like the real thing and are lumped in with the rest of the electronic journalism world – the ones that actually have trained reporters asking questions and separating the news from the chaff.

All this means that when these sites post something like Phillips wrote, the world assumes it is real. The world takes notice. Fiction becomes fact that spreads like a virus across the lines of the Internet.

It took about four hours for a real reporter at the Times to sort through the stuff Phillips had published and turn his “facts” back to fiction. It took a lot of phone calls. It took a lot of questions. It took care and analysis. It took everything that wasn't provided when the article was first published on the Internet.

The reporter's work prompted Phillips to send a letter to the editor of the Times - even though we didn't and wouldn't have run his piece as submitted - that included this sentence: “This is more than enough to convince me that the error is mine, not the Board of Elections. I owe an apology, and this is it.”

Had he sent his work to a real news organization in the first place, he never would have had to say he was sorry. The facts would have been checked before it was published. The problem is that isn't what happened.

Phillips promotes himself as one of the leading election fraud investigators in the United States, so he had nothing to gain by getting things wrong in this case. He was just a human who made an error. Maybe his greater error was in not sending the piece to be looked at by real journalists in the first place.

Real news organizations are also capable of human error, but the standards of the profession force them at all times to strive for accuracy and to minimalize the chance for mistakes. When you eliminate these standards from the equation, you get Web sites like the one who published Phillips's flawed piece. That is scary.