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（San Francisco Chronicle より）
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/07/13/IN82900.DTL&type=printable
www.sfgate.com
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MEDIA STUDIES
The facts and the truth
The dead zone: perils of Internet news
- Stephanie Salter, Insight Staff Writer
Sunday, July 13, 2003
Other than the part about Katherine Harris being dead, Internet investigative reporter Michael Thomas stands by his story. Or rather his colleague Tom Flocco's story, which moved on tomflocco.com July 7 with the headline, "Florida Representative Katherine Harris Dead in Plane Crash."
"The only thing we got wrong in the story was, she's alive," said Thomas. "The story wasn't all about the dead part. It was also about voter fraud."
For all the criticism hurled at mainstream news media these days - loads of it well deserved - the porousness of Internet journalism is fairly breathtaking. Anyone with access to a PC. can be a publisher, reporter, editor,
photographer, opinion columnist or all five at once.
In cyberspace, people with stories to share, axes to grind, fears to feed or conspiracies to spin need never run out of room - or into in-house libel attorneys. "Facts" are whatever the person who posts them says they are.
Which is not to imply that Tom Flocco, Michael Thomas and dozens of other online investigative reporters aren't laboring hard to pursue that elusive (and maybe illusive) entity called The Truth. If detailed research counts for anything, tomflocco.com is an investigative journalism empire.
One article alone - a French electrical engineer's exhaustive line-up of theories on how the Sept. 11, 2001 plane crash into the Pentagon was faked - could keep a reader engaged (and paranoid) for weeks. As the engineer, Jean- Pierre Desmoulins, says near the top of his treatise: "Let's try to find some locked doors and imagine what's behind them."
Not exactly the advice a typical daily newspaper reporter gets from an assignment editor, the ex-New York Times scribe Jayson Blair notwithstanding.
As for Katherine Harris being dead, well, from cyberspace, she sure looked it to Flocco and Thomas. Men who came to investigative reporting later in life and not through the traditional channel of journalism school or newspapering, Flocco and Thomas followed their own protocol for assembling the story.
Flocco, a retired school teacher, was told by a source he'd previously worked with and trusted that Harris had been a passenger in a twin-engine Beechcraft that crashed near the Toronto Islands airport in Ontario about 10 a. m., July 7. The source also said Florida Governor Jeb Bush was seen near the crash site.
Working from opposite ends of the country - another advantage of the cyber newsroom - Flocco and Thomas confirmed that such a plane had gone down in that place at that time and also, they say, that Bush had been in Toronto "on a trade mission" that day.
Then tomflocco.com started calling the congresswoman's office in Washington,
the first time at 10:35 p.m. Eastern time.
"Nobody should have answered there at that hour," said Thomas, adding that Congress wasn't even in session that day.
But a woman did answer, he said, not with "Representative Harris' office," but a simple "Hello." When asked if it was Harris' office, the woman said yes. Had Harris died in a plane crash that morning? Flocco reported on his Web site:
"The woman somberly told this reporter, ﾔNo comment. We're busy. Goodbye.' "
More calls produced the same response, said Thomas, including a call by Flocco around midnight in which the unidentified woman said: "I only answered because I thought you were someone else. I don't have the authority to answer that question. Goodbye."
Thomas said he got a similar response at 1:30 a.m. Pacific Time.
"Why didn't they just tell us she was alive?" said Thomas, two days after the story ran and a day after tom flocco.com issued a grudging retraction/apology because a Harris aide told them via phone that Harris was alive.
Why? As Thomas sees it, either Flocco was set up by his source and Harris' people because his Web site has pounded nonstop at the train wreck that was Florida's 2000 election. Then again . . .
"Her press secretary claims she's alive," said Thomas. "Have you seen her? She was supposed to be on the floor in the House. I've been watching C-Span all morning and I still haven't seen her. When we ask to speak to her, we're told she's not available. "
For the record (such as it is in an imperfect world), a call from this reporter to Harris' office elicited a request to submit all questions by e- mail. That done, and while waiting for a response from her press secretary that did not come by deadline time, this reporter logged onto the House of Representatives Web site.
Two days after she was reported dead, Harris was among 394 yea voters on an appropriations bill and among 417 people who voted to increase the amount forgiven student loans to teachers of math, science and special ed.
E-mail Stephanie Salter at ssalter@sfchronicle.com.'
Page D - 3
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/07/13/IN82900.DTL
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