Journalists

Abstract

Abstract On March 22, 2007, the presidential campaign of John Edwards announced that the candidate and his wife would hold an important press conference that afternoon. Shortly before the press conference, CNN, Fox News, and other cable networks began broadcasting stories that Edwards’s wife, Elizabeth, would announce that her breast cancer was no longer in remission and that her husband would suspend his presidential campaign. The story spread across the Internet as well. The campaign told journalists the rumor was not true, but the denial failed to halt the spread of the story. The problem was the story really was false. When the news conference occurred, the Edwardses announced that they would continue their campaign despite the cancer news. Journalists struggled to explain how and why they had given out false information. The source for the news media accounts turned out to be a recently created blog called Politico.com. In contravention of traditional journalistic standards, the blogger who broke the story, a former Washington Post reporter, had reported the rumor after hearing it from only one source. That source turned out to be mistaken. The journalist justified his use of only one source by saying that blogs “share information in real time.”