Following the Rolling Stone article from a few months ago (which I discussed here), it’s important to look at other things that are affected by our need for everything NOW.
Everyone likes to get their information spoon fed to them as fast as possible, and if a news site doesn’t get up the story fast, they fear getting beat by a competitor…and they’ll take that risk of speed, instead of fact checking the article before posting it.
A good example was Friday as the new administration took office, all of the old stuff got rolled off the Internet and into Archives.
This included Twitter accounts (such as @POTUS and @WhiteHouse) and the actual website for the White House.
At the stroke of Noon, the Obama administration pages went into archives, while the primary pages were reset to Stage Zero, and started to get rebuilt for the new Trump presidency.
But that didn’t stop websites, such as Complex, from running stories about the Trump administration removing Climate Change, Healthcare, and Civil Rights from the White House website…and of course the Internet (and the social media beasts) ran with that, instead of remembering that this is standard protocol and not a “scrub of data”.
Complex, after a bunch of Tweets and pictures, added to the end of their story the following:
…The new site is poorly written and researched, as well as underdeveloped, so it’s possible that these scrubs are an oversight—plus, it’s standard protocol for incoming administrations to delete all existing materials on the official site…
So they basically acknowledge that their whole story is just about riling people up, and not actually factual, since it’s standard protocol and not the “scrub” that the article leads readers to believe (readers that we all know take the headlines and run, and will never read to the end of a story…too many words and all).
Time for the media, and anyone that wants to consider themselves as such, to start putting the facts up front, and stop being click-bait and the one that fans the flames of the Internet.
Aviously 