Cable Took Us From 30 To 50mph, The Net Took Us To Warp Speed

It wasn't until I was driving home last night that it really hit me. In a span of about ten seconds or so, I honed in on one of the most troubling aspects of the era of decentralized media we're entering, a danger to our ability to find and receive reliable information. We're simply going too fast.

Speed kills and the potential victim in this race is accuracy and understanding. Making my way home, I tuned into a radio talk show host I'd never listened to before, never even heard of. It wasn't Air America but this was a liberal host, at least as I heard his position on the war in Iraq. It's not everyday you hear one of those on the radio so, being something of a radiophile, I thought I'd listen.

When a caller asked for an explanation of the roots of the Valerie Plame investigation, the host described it thusly: Former Ambassador Joe Wilson wrote an op-ed questioning the veracity of the administration's claims that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger based upon a mission he took to investigate it. Columnist Bob Novak then "called out" Wilson's wife, a CIA "operative," in his column. Then Judith Miller "called out" Plame in the New York Times.

That was the moment. My first reaction was to change the station, mumbling something like, "if you can't get the facts straight …" It's a complicated story, but one aspect easy to understand and widely noted is that Miller never wrote about Plame. But what does it really say about our sources of information that little things like this are routinely either misunderstood or simply left out there to be absorbed as fact?

And how prevalent is this phenomenon? Just think about it, how many times do you hear someone on TV – a pundit, an analyst, an expert – say something that you know is factually incorrect? How many times do you read something on a blog or in a newspaper story that has a fact or two that just isn't quite true?

I'm not talking about the "big issues." If someone says something like, "Karl Rove leaked a CIA operatives name in a calculated campaign to discredit Joe Wilson" is something that certainly has not been proven to be true. But that is a charge, leveled by political opponents of Rove, ideologues or, perhaps, irresponsible journalists. Those are things that articles are written about.

What I'm thinking of is the simple, oftentimes mundane, facts that provide the framework for those larger issues. Unfortunately in today's warp-speed news cycle, I think it happens all too often. What's the danger in that, you ask? It's the little facts like this that make up the bigger picture and when they're wrong, the picture is distorted. And the casual observer of a given story needs as clear a picture as possible to form their own opinions.

Misinformation is nothing new and news organizations often try to clear things up, even if the clarification is buried in a corrections box on page A-30. But information flies so much faster now that a lie (or inaccuracy) can travel around the world before the truth (or clarification) opens its eyes. It gets embedded into the narrative for many, twisted and used by some to push their agenda while other real facts are ignored by others to push theirs.

Oftentimes, the root cause of it today is the speed at which we all write, think and speak. As someone who worked at "The Hotline" putting out massive amounts of copy in a very short period of time, I know about mistakes. As a pundit on television, I'm surely guilty of committing a sin similar to that of the radio host I heard last night. I'm positive I said things from time to time that wasn't 100% accurate but was never called on it (for some reason, I always called Senator Lincoln Chafee his father, the late Senator John Chafee for example). And now the need for speed continues on PE. I hope you'll let me know when we're a little off.

In the rush for the next "development" to push the story "forward," correcting inaccuracies is a job left to someone else, usually the individual. Few, it seems, want the details in the race to the next "big" thing. Perhaps asserting that Miller wrote about Valerie Plame doesn't really change the meta-story here, but facts are facts and it's worth getting them straight.