Tiger Woods and Media Ethics

Are we now living in a world where big stories will more often than not be misreported by media outlets before being corrected? That's the contention of Eric Deggans of the National Sports Journalism Center, and there are several ethics matters to consider that relate to issues we've discussed all semester.

First is Deggans' feeling that the story "feels like a bit of a turning point; the moment when we accept that today’s sped-up, always-on media environment virtually guarantees that controversial, confusing stories like Woods’ car accident will be misreported in the early hours and corrected as time goes on."

I am hopeful that this won't always be the case, but it certainly seems to be the way things are going. One version of a story breaks, more facts come out, some of which contradict the early version, the story is revised and so forth. It's hard to know who this serves. Certainly not the players in the story. Not the reader, apart from perhaps titillating them. And ultimately not most media outlets themselves, aside from perhaps getting some web hits and being able to say they were on top of it.

I say most because clearly outfits like TMZ exist solely for this purpose. And that's the second question. Should national outlets like USA Today and The New York Times even be trying to compete with the Enquirer on stories like this? This one is a little more complicated because the initial reports implied Woods had been seriously hurt. But if we knew from the jump this was ultimately about an affair and a woman scorned, is that something really worth the attention of the Gray Lady? Conversely, I suppose, with gossip the only thing you can sell nowadays, can they afford to ignore it?

The whole thing seems like such a strange exercise. Yet, I'm not sure how it's to be avoided entirely. A story breaks. People are Twittering. How long can your paper wait to publish what it knows, even if all it knows amounts to little more than rumor? It depends on the nature of the publication of course, but even for the so-called Mainstream Media generally, it's hard to ignore the early rumblings entirely, wrongheaded though they may be. But the question of who that policy ultimately serves remains.