CNN vs. the Internet? Who Do You Trust?

Yesterday on Facebook my friend Caren Kaplan, a professor at the University of California at Davis, posted the following status update:  "Why was CNN showing stock footage of UC Davis protests from last fall as if it was happening today?" By what standard of journalism would CNN put forth stock footage as if it were  real event.   "Citizen journalists" on the Internet called out the substitution as they have done, more than once, against Fox which has also done this kind of journalistic sleight-of-hand.  

My friend Caren was part of the nationwide strike in which students, faculty, parents, and interested others stood together, at campuses all across the country, on behalf of public education and against the spending cuts that are resulting in higher and higher tuition costs.   It was a well-organized event.  It deserved serious media coverage.   I've not seen anything like serious coverage of the strikes or of the issue.   But that's a subject for another day.

What I'm concerned about today is journalistic ethics.   When we talk about "twenty-first century literacies" and we who teach new media underscore the importance of teaching our students about the issue of credibility on the un-curated Internet, where there is no authority to adjudicate accuracy or standards in many cases, we sometimes act as if the Internet is all wild, wild West and the traditional news media are all reliable and credible.   Yet, as legal theorist Jonathan Zittrain noted when he was here this week, whenever we find ourselves reported on in the media or whenever we read about a subject we know well first-hand, we are often appalled at the mistakes, small and large.   Still, we like to believe that, in general, the news, in print or in broadcast media, is accurate--even when we know it is not always so when we know the facts.  

Personally, I'm sick and tired of the terrible reporting these days and also of the cowardess of traditional media.   Jon Stewart noted recently that it is hard to imagine another time in history when news media would stand silently by as another news channel, Fox News, called the President of the United States a communist, a terrorist, and worse.   In another era, that would be called treason by some, unpatriotic by virtually all.    Why has accepting bad journalism become a norm?  

I don't have an answer but I'm positive that "the Internet" is not the cause of these bad news days.  Quite the contrary, I turn to my own reliable Internet sources when credibility and credulity are both strained in traditional sources.   What about you?