The social media outrage over the now infamous non-sacking of a freelance ABC presenter highlights a huge problem with society – and it isn’t the ABC's management.
In this age of outrage now, ask questions later, society has become obsessed with instant judgment irrespective of facts.
The more shock value that you can share on Twitter, Facebook and god knows where else – the better. Even journalists, who should know better, are getting in on the act.
On Tuesday, that great bastion of unbiased truth telling, The Daily Telegraph, used a hilarious and viral on air reaction to engineer a humourless, agenda-driven piece claiming (without any evidence whatsoever) that ABC24 newsreader Natasha Exelby had paid for the unintentional gaffe with her job.
It claimed Exelby would no longer be a newsreader and even implied our public broadcaster had been more harsh in its treatment of Exelby than the Q&A producers who had allowed a former terror suspect of sitting in the audience on a program discussing terrorism.
The only evidence a News Corp journalist could present to back her case, conveniently buried at the very bottom of the piece where few people would bother reading it, is an ABC statement that explained Exelby is a casual reporter who does shift work and has been booked to do occasional shifts.
Exelby even told News Corp she couldn’t comment. This was preceded by Tweets of outrage, shock, horror by fellow journalists who either didn’t bother reading the article or took News Corp’s mischievous attempt to stir shit literally.
This spread like wildfire on social media, even Bill Shorten embarrassingly screamed outrage without checking facts.
It is doubtful that 90% of people read beyond the headline or other armchair warriors' comments, and perhaps another 5% read a few pars before taking the bait. I suspect very few people even considered the source.
If ABC-bashing were an Olympic sport, News Corp would be fighting for the gold medal with a raft of right-wing shock jocks and their friends in the press.
A day later ABC is forced to come out to explain that Exelby hadn’t been sacked at all, but the damage had already been done.
News Corp Agenda 1 Society 0.
This isn’t the only case where social media outrage hit a crescendo seconds after agenda-fuelled bullshit was published.
The Coopers con job
A blogger recently suggested Coopers was behind a clumsy video discussing marriage equality that was produced and published by The Bible Society.
In this instance, absolutely no evidence was offered by the blogger in question, not even an attempt to ask Coopers WTF they were doing.
Before any real journalism lens could be applied everyone was boycotting Coopers because they either felt strongly about marriage equality or couldn’t believe the beer brand had funded a video for a religious organisation.
No thought was given to whether Coopers was even involved – it was assumed because an unqualified blogger told us so.
Both reasons for outage were proven complete bullshit, but by then the damage was done.
What happened to critical thinking?
Have we become so flippant for facts, desperate for social media attention or time poor that we have forgotten to apply the very basic level of scrutiny to any information we stumble across these days?
Is the Tinder ‘swipe right if you like, left if you think it’s ugly’ mantra now become the norm when consuming media?
This is something that truly disturbs me as a journalist and a member of society. It undermines the great work that hard-hitting, passionate journalists out there are producing under immense pressure and I'm concerned that journalism and its role to hold power to account could die if people value the truth this little.
I also believe that critical thinking is sorely lacking in this information age at a time when we need it more than ever before.
News Corp is entitled to angle stories in whichever way it pleases. I don't always agree with it but there's plenty of alternative sources to provide balance and facts.
Checking sources and facts should be more important than forming judgment over salacious headlines, and if you can’t spend the few minutes it takes to do this, you are susceptible to being served snake oil every time.
For trivial puff pieces and celebrity gossip (most of which is bullshit, BTW) this doesn’t matter.
But for US elections, Brexit and other important life decisions – it does.
I don’t know if they teach kids to critically analyse news and information at high school, but they really should. It's also a skill that adults should apply at every noisy juncture of the internet.
We really risk becoming a much dumber society in the future if we don’t start combating fake news, PR spin and nonsense today.