There's a quote usually attributed to the writer Mark Twain that goes: "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."
If he lived in the era of social media - he would know that there's now no limit to how fast fake news can travel.
Fake News is a phenomenon that in recent years has been made worse by the speed at which news is expected to be delivered - readers and viewers want the whole story, and NOW.
The need for speed versus the need for accuracy was the topic of discussion last night at a U.S. and Taiwanese Embassy hosted Media literacy forum.
In the forum's windup, we got some reflections on urgency in the newsroom and what's called news laundering from Channel 5 journalist Isani Cayetano and our News Director Jules Vasquez:
Isani Cayetano, Journalist, Channel 5
"Ideally one would want to find a happy medium between delivering information in a timely manner and delivering information as accurately as possible. There are times however and I can almost say more often than not they don't work in tandem with each other because you're dealing with developing matters and once your reliant upon a subject or an organization perhaps to provide you with that information and if you pride yourself as either being a responsible reporter or a responsible news organization then part of that responsibility means leaning towards being accurate because that's where the credibility and that's where everything else comes from. But you're living in a society whereas I mentioned before people want the information and they want it now and so we try to break stories as they happen and then proceed throughout the course of the day to deliver the follow up long story short it's for me a matter of being considerate for both ends. It's a matter of trying to find that balance where I can tell you that something just happened and this is preliminary information and I can also go back and continue to work on what Jules would mention as a long-form story that fleshes out exactly what took place and what are the factors that come into play in respect of that particular story."
Jules Vasquez, News Director, Channel 7
"News morphs from fantastical to apparently factual because a traditional media house takes it on and you know all this is driven by the elephant in the room traffic. Facebook and other social media platforms, you want to talk about bad actors I am sorry but I don't know a worse one than Mark Zuckerberg in terms of the Facebook algorithm is so designed is so hungry for traffic that it encourages clickbait headlines and because the person who posts that headline is able to as we discussed earlier monetize that all that traffic that he gets from a, he or she gets from a completely spurious headline."
"All of these things are driven by traffic and traffic is driven by eyeballs and eyeballs is driven by sensation and sensation is often driven by a loose affiliation with the facts."
The forum - with international presenters - was live on all radio and TV station.
