Tortoise and hare — a fable about deadline-driven journalism
- By Ni Tao
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, December 23, 2013
We have all heard the tale of the tortoise and the hare. Despite its slow speed, the tortoise’s tenacity helps it to come from behind to win the race while its conceited opponent sleeps.
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The tortoise and the hare |
The moral of the story is that being fast doesn’t guarantee victory, while the slower party doesn’t always lose.
This moral applies to journalism today. In a world where news is updated on a minute-by-minute basis, we are daily inundated by information. And so short has our attention span become that only the most eye-popping news items can pique our curiosity and sustain it.
But “slow” news won’t necessarily be sidelined by the demand for speedy, almost industrialized production of news, for speed means room for error.
The biggest victim of speed, or timeliness, is fact, the lifeblood of journalism. In media’s quest to beat rivals in breaking a story, corners are likely to be cut, important facts overlooked and news items sensationalized. Worse, some breaking stories are but the fabricated works of a few rumor-mongers.
A notable example is the recent case of a Chinese woman accused of falsely blaming a foreign man who allegedly came to her aid after she fell off her scooter at a crossroads in Beijing. The woman was cursed online for being ungrateful. And the foreigner’s presence makes this incident a matter of national “face,” which elicited more scorn for the woman.
In a dramatic twist , it was later revealed that the foreigner did collide with the woman’s scooter, causing her to tumble. And when he tried to flee but was stopped by the victim, he began to swear. As a result, many self-righteous moralists fell silent in shame.
Of course, we cannot blame them entirely for being gullible. It is the duty of the press to present unbiased news.
However, some news portals and newspapers did not bother with fact-checking. Without thinking twice, they published what they thought was probably another sequel to the series of published “good Samaritans wronged” reports — and paid the price for lack of due diligence.
Yet no one apologized for this slip-up and for misleading the public.
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