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Earlier this week, news started spreading via both mainstream media and on Twitter that Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot had died. Not true. And after the correct news started making its way around, people started pointing fingers.
First off, here are a couple of the mistaken stories, as presented in a good post by Montreal blogger Steve Faguy (click for larger):
In terms of laying blame, Mathew Ingram of GigaOm and Peter Kafka at AllThingsD argue that people should stop blaming Twitter because good old traditional media played a big role in this. Here’s Ingram’s take:
… Once it became known that Lightfoot had not in fact gone to his eternal reward, plenty of people spent the next several hours doing another thing that people love to do on Twitter: blame Twitter for spreading a fake news report. But as Peter Kafka correctly points out, Twitter didn’t kill Gordon Lightfoot — traditional media did. It appeared to start with a prank phone call (remember the telephone?) to the management company representing Lightfoot’s close friend and fellow musical legend Ronnie Hawkins, from someone pretending to be Lightfoot’s grandson.
Hawkins then started calling people to let them know, who in turn alerted Canwest News Service, which called Hawkins to confirm the news and then published a brief news item that got picked up by a number of the chain’s newspapers. That report was then spread by reporters on Twitter, including Canwest political reporter David Akin, who later wrote a blog post about the role he played in the story.
As Akin notes in his analysis of what happened, traditional news wires regularly report things that turn out to be wrong, including the deaths of famous people. Back in the PT days (pre-Twitter), only traditional journalists saw those reports, and while they occasionally made their way into print or onto a TV news show, for the most part newswires like the Associated Press and Reuters corrected them before they escaped into the real world …
Not that I want to pile on against evil big media but in fact there are many examples wherein AP or Reuters were the ones who falsely reported a death. One famous example came years ago when AP shunted Bob Hope into an early grave. In fact, death by media is so common that I dedicated a chapter to it in my book and also came up with a specific term to describe it: obiticide. You can read an excerpt from that chapter here. And go here to have a look at the many obiticides collected on this site. Update: Oh, and I forget to add a link to a CJR column I wrote about obiticide, which includes this quick list of death by media victims from 2008:
Just this past year, newspapers have killed off Frank McCourt, Billy Graham (twice!), Muhammad Ali, Pat Robertson and Victor Willis of Village People fame. (Okay, it’s a bit of a stretch to include the last one.)
A lot of not-so-famous people were also victims. Heck, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution even killed a funeral director …
So the next time you hear somebody talk about the Internet killing off celebrities, be sure to remind them that newspapers, wire services, magazines, and radio and TV have been doing it for a whole lot longer. And they’re still the champs.
