The (lack of) scandal over Womens' Day's recent fabrication of Kate Ritchie's wedding exclusive is a grim reminder not to trust the media.
On principle, I'm no advocate of crowd-sourced "news" content. Those little notes at the end of embarrassingly short and usually poorly edited breaking stories on news sites begging, "Did you see the fire/shootout/explosion? Send us your photos and video!" make me want to set up a micropayment system for all the unpaid journalist-bystanders that support such publications.
However, the benefit of citizen-journliasm, crowd-sourced news, and the crappy camera in your phone is this: they help to reduce the prevalence of published lies.
It's not just tabloid newspapers that fabricate stories. These days I take literally everything I read with a grain of salt and as a consequence, the world seems intangible and fanciful, full of lies, published lies, and possible lies. Every piece of information comes to me through the twisted prism of The Great Race For Advertising Dollars. At best, what I know is a complete misrepresentation of reality.
Often, my own personal, physical experience seems like the only concrete reality. Perhaps that's the real reason why crowd-sourced content is beginning to seem so much more believable than the officially "produced" stories.
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