By now, if you haven’t heard the story of the Balloon Boy, well, you must live in a bubble (I know, sorry). Frankly, I could care less whether poor little Falcon Heene was hiding in the attic or actually trapped high above Ft. Collins, Colorado in the belly of his Dad’s jiffy pop creation. Nor do I care if the whole thing was a hoax. What does interest me is how a story like this can evolve, or shall we say, balloon, in the media.
Know your sources?
The nature of news media, and how a story transitions from non-traditional to mainstream media outlets has been of interest to me for some time. In my opinion, we all want to should know where our news comes from and how trustworthy the source. Most will remember Jason Blair’s handiwork at the New York Times, but in many cases we are not dealing with fabricated sources, rather niche or foreign. In my case, I used to work at a program at Georgetown University Medical Center dedicated to tracking global internet news media, looking for signs of socially disruptive events suspected to be caused by biological agents, like influenza. The approach at Georgetown was analogous to the United States National Weather Service storm warning models (such as the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale) to detect and assess threatening weather conditions.
Of course, the concept of using internet news media for detecting and tracking disease is not unique, with excellent examples to include Healthmap and Google Flu Trends. Moreover, there are folks who attempted to leverage news media reports for trading on Wall Street. Take my favorite example from years past, Monitor 110. Once heralded as a “Bloomberg killer”, Monitor 110 was based on a thesis that,
…more and better information is being put out on the Internet every day, information that can be valuable to Institutional investors who are constantly looking for an edge. And these investors were not very sophisticated about how to best access this information; Monitor110 would use technology to help them get that edge.
During my two years at Georgetown, we tracked thousands of events and handled millions of news media articles from around the world. Like Monitor 110 and Healthmap, we were tracking information vital to our clients; they rapidly needed accurate and actionable information. To ensure accuracy, there was substantial emphasis placed on determining the credibility of a report’s source. In fact, anyone leveraging news media for intelligence needs to address simple questions that are not always easy to answer, for instance:
- Does the event meet the reporting requirements defined by the client?
- What is the cause of this event and is this a new or existing event?
- Where (specifically) is the source located?
- Where (specifically) is the event located?
- Who is involved in the event?
- Who (specifically) is the source of this information (eg. a government official or a citizen)?
- What is the credibility of the author?
- How severe is the event in its local context?
If you think these questions seem simple, think of how you might have analyzed the first report of influenza-like illness in Perote, Mexico – just another influenza case or the start of a pandemic? Take into account this massive information burden and you can see value in qualifying a media report according to local knowledge, while applying technology to automatically triage, or queue, relevant information. Of course, I am referring to strong information retrieval and extraction technologies coupled with customized taxonomies and/or ontologies and effective visualizations to tell the story in context and aid analysis. Good analysts can no longer avoid digging into the data itself or taking a source for his word; even during emerging crises, we’re all super crunchers. Like many, I’ve watched the evolution of Ushahidi over the years, and was pleased to hear the effort advancing with the Swift River project, designed to “crowdsource the filter”:
Who the hell is Wolf Blitzer?
During times of crisis we are inundated with information. I’ve seen in countless times while supporting my clients, and I’ve spoken with folks across industries about how they deal with monitoring (and protecting) the sources that report during crisis. One crisis could be humanitarian, another could be an image crisis, and whether you are an non-profit or a marketing firm, you have to filter the noise.
While the case of the Balloon Boy does not necessarily fit this issue, it speaks to the critical nature of source accuracy. In the end, maybe it was Falcon himself who was on to something when he asked during the CNN interview, “Who the hell is Wolf Blitzer?” Well, most of us know Wolf, but had CNN actually taken the time to ask “Who the hell is Richard Heene?” (the “storm-chasing, science-obsessed” wife-swapper), or dig a bit deeper into the Ft. Collins police, maybe we would have all been spared the tragedy that was not the Balloon Boy.
If we have not already, we will soon forget Falcon, the balloon, and the barfing, but we will continue to see that breaking news is a tough business to get right, especially when you are dealing with critical information. It does not matter if you are a media analyst or Wolf Blitzer – you are only as good as your sources, especially when you fail to vet them properly.
Tags: Media Analysis, Media Hype, Monitor 110, Ushahidi
This entry was posted on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 at 6:02 PM and is filed under Breaking News, Emerging Crisis.
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