2011: the year of journalism scandals and my own media muck up
It was 4.45pm on a Monday afternoon in June and I was desperately ringing up ATM engineers trying to get them to verify something it was becoming obvious was totally untrue. My palms were sweaty and hold music was making me more panicky than usual.
2011 was the year of journalism scandals and June 20th was the day I found myself in the middle of my own minor controversy. It wasn’t going to land me at the Leveson Inquiry or get me hectored by Hugh Grant on Newsnight but it did get me a roasting on Reddit, its own thread on the Snopes website and a mention from Time. One unchecked fact left me more red-faced than Paul McMullan in a sauna.
It all started with an innocuous commission – a piece for a website on artificial sounds created to reassure us in our daily lives. It was such an easy gig that the editor had even sent me a list of the sounds to be included. All I had to do was flesh out the information about each of the five sounds. So I set about my task but neglected one of the golden rules – check your facts.
While the first four artificial sounds were fine (the way a car door clunk is engineered, the vroom of an electric car, piped in stadium sounds and comfort noise on VoIP calls), the fifth wasn’t. The claim that the whirr of cash machines is created by a speaker rested on one unsourced assertion in the sidebar of a Times article from a year earlier. It claimed:
“Cash machines whirr to convince us that our money is on its way.”
Under pressure to get the article finished and filed, I took the statement at face value and went about fleshing it out into an explanation of just why the whirr was fake. I didn’t know where Ben Webster, the author of The Times article, had got the ‘fact’ from but I repeated it. My sloppiness was about to be found out.
At first things went pretty well with the link being shared like mad on Twitter and Facebook – people love stories that seem to reveal something unlikely that’s been passing them by in every day life – but then the link hit Reddit. There, people who actually knew something about ATMs started to chime in. The only fake thing was the claim that cash machine noises are fake.
If I’d taken even a few minutes to think about the assertion, I might have realised that myself. But I didn’t. And so I found myself calling company after company to get a quote from an ATM specialist. If I’d done that in the first place, I’d have avoided the avalanche of aggrieved comments and testy tweets.
I’d always been quick to join in the hooting and hollering on Twitter when another journalist made a mistake. But this time it was me who’d been lazy and failed to check my facts. Having written several pretty long and heavily researched features for Wired, I knew how important it was to back up your assertions with quotes and sources. It was a very public and embarrassing lesson learned. Pandagate man, I know how you feel.
