Fake Wedding Fools Korean Media

Here are two articles with opposing examples on the reliability of citizen reporters/bloggers. The first one (Fake Wedding Fools Korean Media) describes a mock wedding on a Tokyo subway captured on cameraphone which spread like wildfire on blogs, and was then picked up by the main stream media as a true story. The second (Bloggers: an army of irregulars), is one journalist's experience of how bloggers have been a very valuabe source for digging up the truth. He gives several examples, one of which is how a blogger was responsible for having tracked down the origin of a fake cartoon which fueled the furore over the characterisation of Muhammad in a Danish paper.

Fake Wedding Fools Korean Media from OhMyNews

... "A subway wedding that touched millions of hearts on the net was a rehearsal staged by the students of an acting club in a local university. By the time they confessed the truth of the "wedding" to a national television crew, their real life acting stunt had been already reported again and again by scores of news media -- including OhmyNews -- as one of the most extraordinary events that shook Korean cyberspace this year. It was the kind of "feel good" news that readers anticipated on the morning of Valentine's Day, and news editors found no reason not to bite.

The short-lived urban fairy tale has a lot in common in terms of mechanism of diffusion with the so-called "dog-poop girl" incident that touched off frenzied on line vigilantism in Korea last summer. "

Both events happened on the subway and were recorded with camera phones by passengers before they were posted on blogs. Once published, the impact was amplified exponentially on the Web by the power of word-of-mouth, coupled with the ease of digital copy and paste.

In the end, the buzz grew so loud that even the mainstream media could not ignore it anymore. Only this time the wedding episode made people feel happier and warmed their hearts -- albeit on a false pretense -- whereas the dog-poop girl was condemned a millions times over on the web.

However one OhmyNews reader countered that such blame fell on the wrong persons. They were simply staging a benign rehearsal with no intention to trick the entire nation. The real crux of this episode would be that "any unknown bystander armed with a camera and Internet access can suddenly increase his social consequence one million times over" as OhmyNews reader drofnats commented. "

Bloggers: an army of irregulars from the BBC

... "Blogs have an army of what Sherlock Holmes called his "Baker Street Irregulars," that is an almost unlimited number of people around the world, many of them expert on the subject under discussion, scouring sources and sending information in to an easily accessible central site which can disseminate it instantly."

... As for using blogs as a source Richard Sambrook, head of the BBC World Service and Global News Division says: "The key is careful attribution. It would be a big mistake for the MSM to try to match the blogs, but they can teach us lessons about openness and honesty. The MSM should concentrate on what it can do - explain, analyse and verify."

emily | 9:37 AM | Citizens as Camera Phone Reporters |
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