From various reports, it is obvious there are some amongst us who embrace lazy thinking. Its 'practitioners' eschew traditional media sources, blithely labelling them as "fake news", preferring to allow conspiracy and fringe science sites to do their thinking for them.
The gullible and the stupid will always be with us.
What none of them want to know or understand is that serious journalism entails great responsibilities, one of the foremost being accuracy. And reputable journals own up to it when that responsibility is not properly discharged.
An excellent illustration of this pertains to a story journalist Michelle Shephard filed in 2010 from Somalia that turned out to be less-than-accurate. Donovan Vincent, The Star's public editor, writes:
Michelle Shephard, then a national security reporter for the Star, travelled to Mogadishu to write about 17-year-old Ismael Abdulle, who told her that the year prior he had been captured by members of Somali terrorist group al-Shabab on his way home from school.
When Shephard met Abdulle for the interview, he was missing his left foot and right hand, limbs the extremists cut off as part of their extreme interpretation of sharia. It was a lesson for turning them down, Abdulle told Shephard.
As a consequence of the story, members of the Toronto Somali community mounted Project Ismael", and ultimately the lad was accepted into Norway as a refugee.
Unfortunately, a significant element of Abdulle's story was false, something he ultimately admitted to Shephard in 2019.
He confessed that he was in fact a thief when al-Shabab caught up with him, just as the terrorist group had claimed publicly at the time. He was armed with a pistol when they grabbed him, he said.
Abdulle and the other boys didn’t escape from al-Shabab after the amputations. They were let go — another lie, he said.
Why did he misrepresent the facts? Abdulle says he made up the story because he wanted to find a westerner to help him get to Europe. That’s when Shephard came along.
He told her he created the story at the time to make himself look “innocent.”
While there are traditional safeguards in place to ensure the accuracy of stories, the fact that this reporting was from a conflict zone complicated matters significantly. Nonetheless, Vincent sees this as a serious breach.
In the Star’s lengthy journalistic standards guide, the blueprint for how we operate as a news organization, you’ll find this line: “Good faith with the reader is the foundation of ethical and excellent journalism. That good faith rests primarily on the reader’s confidence that what we print is correct.”
We can’t lose that faith. It’s our duty to print the truth and be able to stand behind what we say.
The case is a cautionary tale for all journalists.
Whether it’s a war zone or any other challenging circumstance, journalists need to find ways to confirm whether the details they’ve gathered are true. And if there’s a doubt, there’s always the option of simply not publishing.
No matter how sympathetic the victim, reporters still need to ask probing questions and maintain a level of skepticism. In cases involving victims of torture, for example, we have to balance that skepticism with compassion.
The non-thinking, reflexive elements of our populace will say this story verifies their cries that mainstream media are purveyors of fake news. What they will conveniently ignore, however, is the real story, that even after almost 13 years, the inaccuracy of Shephard's reporting is being addressed in an effort to set the record straight.
I have yet to see such efforts on Rebel News or any other fringe source of 'information'.
