Through analysis of historical listserv dialogue and traditional media dissection of a watershed debate—that a missile caused the TWA 800 crash on July 17, 1996—this study seeks to shed light on an early example of journalistic wariness and mistrust of the Internet as a news source. Specifically, we analyze the rhetoric of the late Pierre Salinger's connections to the historic incident, and the credibility of the Internet as a news source, as debated by professional journalists on the Internet and in mainstream media forums. A rhetorical analysis of how this debate was framed suggests that negative journalistic perceptions of the Internet's news credibility were already solidifying by the mid-1990s, and have continued to do so since that time.
Evaluating the news credibility of a medium as vast and publicly popular as the Internet has become increasingly difficult. In 2000, one-third of Americans went online for news at least once a week, compared to 20% in 1998. And 15% said they received daily news reports from the Internet, up from 6% in 1998 (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2000). Historically speaking, established media technologies such as motion pictures, radio, newspapers, and network television all waned in popularity as newer technologies were developed and diffused (DeFleur & Ball-Rokeach, 1989; Merrill & Lowenstein, 1971; Neuman, 1991). While it is not yet certain that Internet news content will displace traditional news content, the historical patterns of competition among mass media provide suggestive evidence for the replacement hypothesis (Althaus & Tewksbury, 2000).
In the past, the journalistic community—via news councils, ombudsmen, codes of ethics, journalism reviews and academic analysis—has practiced self-criticism of the traditional media, specifically, newspapers and broadcast outlets (Ruggiero, 2001, 2003). During the last decade, Internet journalism has also come to be increasingly scrutinized, despite its seemingly obvious benefits as both a news outlet and as a forum for journalistic ethical discussion. Computer-mediated communication channels such as listservs and weblogs have operated as arenas for discussion and negotiation of journalistic norms. At the same time, critics contend that because of the Internet's billions of web pages, "news" sources can range from respected media outlets to fringe activists (Greer, 2003). As journalistic criticism of the Internet as a credible news source persists, journalists struggle to retain cultural authority over a dramatically changing news process.
In this study we examine an early case that fanned the flames of journalistic wariness of the Internet as a news source. Through an examination of archived electronic mail messages, as well as traditional media stories and editorials, this study seeks to shed light on early journalistic reluctance to accept Internet news content as reliable compared to traditional media news content. Unlike Durham (1998), who conducted a textual analysis of only the New York Times' coverage of the investigation of the crash of TWA Flight 800, we examined archived electronic mail messages posted on two journalism listservs: "Computer-assisted reporting and research" (CARR-L), and "Society of Professional Journalists" (SPJ-L), between November 8, 1996 and April 30, 1997, and major American newspapers and wire services available through the LEXIS-NEXIS online database for that same time period. During that period, journalists analyzed and argued about whether the late journalist Pierre Salinger was duped by bogus Internet information that a missile caused the 1996 TWA 800 crash-assertions extensively debated electronically, as well as in the conventional news media. Rhetoric derived from the two listservs was selected for analysis because professional journalists comprised the majority of the discussants.
This study is an analysis of how those debates and discussions about Salinger's connections to Internet "news" were rhetorically framed by journalists. It also seeks to discover to what extent negative journalistic perceptions of the Internet's news credibility were present prior to the TWA Flight 800 crash, and to what extent the weight of those negative perceptions continues to influence current journalistic perceptions of the credibility of the Internet as a news source.
Starr (1982) defines "cultural authority" as the power to define and describe reality. Journalists seek credibility and believability, as this gives them the cultural authority to inform audiences which events are important, and which are not important. Groups of journalists, like all groups, seek power and authority (Carey, 1986; Reese, 1990; Schudson, 1995). For journalists to become authoritative, they must earn a reputation for being truthful, honest, unbiased, and for performing a public service by informing people of the important events of the day.
Cultural authority gives journalists the ability not only to decide what is "news," but also to control and define standards of journalistic practice (Zelizer, 1993). Winch (1997) suggests that journalists, when discussing the "professional" implications of journalism, are also, in effect, giving shape to the cultural space of journalism, setting its boundaries by identifying taboos and deviance. When journalists such as the Washington Post's Janet Cooke, or more recently, the New Republic's Stephen Glass and the New York Times' Jayson Blair, engaged in behavior considered fraudulent by the journalistic community, the community declared the person a deviant, then described and denounced the acts of deviance. This process, which Durkheim (1984) called "sanctioning deviance," serves to reinforce and reconstruct the boundaries of journalism's cultural space, and to reinforce the cultural authority of journalism. Journalists, like those in other professional groups, often respond to threats to their cultural authority through a kind of rhetorical discourse known as self-criticism. While journalists tend to deny the institutionalization of their occupation and underplay the communal aspects of their work, they share a common discourse and common experiences (Zelizer, 1993). In contrast to journalists' tendency to portray their work as objective, the journalistic community frame often depicts that work as value-laden, communal, continuous, and narrativistic.
Some in the journalistic community viewed the Internet quite early on as a potential rival news source that would be difficult to police. For example, in 1994, a journalist reminisced about a time prior to the Internet: "Newspapers are devoted to the past in ways that go way beyond the obvious… The values and culture of a newspaper still harken back audibly to an earlier time, to an Industrial Age when newspapers still ruled the media world" (Conniff, 1994, p. 5). Conniff also expressed trepidation for the future cultural authority of traditional journalists: "Newspapers are going to get blown away by any Tom, Dick, or Jane Soave Bolla with a computer and an address on the Internet. They'll be lucky if they're still around to write their own obituaries" (Conniff, 1995, p. 4).
Characterizations of the Internet as a rumor mill also began to appear in the conventional media in the mid-1990s. Alluding to an Internet story with an Associated Press byline and a Vatican City dateline—which described an alleged press conference in which the Vatican announced that Microsoft Inc. had agreed to acquire the Roman Catholic Church for Microsoft shares—Editor & Publisher lamented, "instantaneous communication through a global computer network now makes a stunt like this as easy as pie. The system has openings through which pranksters can drive a truck anonymously and dangerously" (Fun and Games, 1995, p. 6). Another example of early traditional media web phobia is Garneau's (1994) claim that: "[o]ne anonymous person can communicate fictitious information to potentially millions of others and can implicate innocent parties in a web of false impressions." Even prestige journalists sounded the warning bell. Louis Boccardi, president and chief executive officer of the Associated Press, cautioned:
In the giddy, throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks world of cyberspace, journalists must not let themselves be seduced into dropping their own standards. The new order will demand greater accountability from journalists as well-and precaution by them, too, so we don't allow the seductiveness of technology to change the principles of what we do. (Fitzgerald, 1995, p. 31)
By the mid-1990s, the stage was set for an incendiary incident that would spark a major debate within the journalistic community about the Internet's credibility as a news source. Ironically, electronic resources, particularly journalism listservs and newsgroups, ended up serving as conduits for debate on journalistic cultural authority. During this period, most professional journalists had ready access to the Internet, and many contributed to listserv discussions about Salinger and Internet news credibility.
This historical analysis explores the role that two Internet listservs—CARR-L and SPJ-L—played in discussions of journalistic cultural authority, reliability of Internet "news" sources, and the potential for veteran journalists like Salinger to be misled when using these cyber-age research tools. To ensure comprehensiveness of the journalistic discussion, the study also analyzes discourse from traditional news forums such as newspaper "hard news" stories, columns, and editorial cartoons. At that time, as now, the tools were available on and off-line for journalists not only to engage in significant examination of the Internet as a credible news source, but also to enlist others to criticize the Internet as "deviant" in order to secure the cultural boundaries of traditional journalistic authority.
Background on the TWA Flight 800 Crash
On July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800, a Paris-bound Boeing 747 aircraft, exploded minutes after taking off from New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, killing all 230 people on board. According to press reports, for months investigators speculated whether the plane might have been brought down by a missile, a bomb, or some kind of catastrophic mechanical malfunction. More than 100 people on the nearby Long Island shore interviewed after the crash reported seeing streaks of light or a missile in the sky before the blast. The United States National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Bureau of Investigation virtually ruled out the possibility that the plane was downed by "friendly fire"—a missile mistakenly fired by the U.S. military. On November 8, 1996, however, a persistent rumor that a U.S. Navy missile shot down TWA Flight 800 erupted again after Pierre Salinger, a former ABC news correspondent, said in a speech that he had new information on a secret document confirming the rumor. News reports claimed that Salinger's document was the same message that had traversed the Internet since August. The rumor was again denied by the FBI and the White House, but reported by the major television networks and circulated on the Associated Press wire service. Thereafter, a vigorous debate about Salinger and Internet news credibility ensued among journalists via messages on electronic discussion groups, and in the traditional media via columns and editorials and news stories.
Brummett (1984) argues that studying mass media content as "symbolic equipment" allows the researcher to reveal information about the human condition; it generates knowledge that is epistemic rather than merely evaluative. In our analysis, we utilized Burke's (1992) ideas about discovering a "representative anecdote" within a piece of rhetoric—something he defined as a story or sub-plot representative of the essence of the entire work under analysis. A representative anecdote is identified by asking, if this discourse were based on an anecdote, what would the form, outline, or bare bones of that story be? (Brummett, 1984). One aspect of Burke's theory of dramatistic rhetoric involves conflict and division that sometimes threatens an existing form of order or hierarchy—in this case journalistic cultural authority. Burke's theory also stresses the role of the rhetoric of identification and separateness (Nichols, 1952). In this historical episode, we interpret how some journalists framed Salinger as a "journalist," while others rhetorically constructed him as being outside—or separate from—the cultural authority of journalists. We also interpret rhetoric that frames Internet "news" information, like that purveyed by Salinger, as being outside the boundary of standards of journalistic reliability.
According to Nichols (1952), Burke's analysis tools work well when examining the rhetoric that identifies and separates people, because it is a kind of verbal warfare that typifies and defines social interaction. Gieryn (1995) also examines the way professional group members socially construct boundaries around their professions using the rhetoric of identification and exclusion. In the online and offline discussions analyzed, we searched for examples of the rhetoric of identification and exclusion. The descriptions and identifiers were examined as a group, to identify recurring evaluative portrayals, and individually, to find different wordings of these portrayals. By examining all the messages and highlighting the descriptive phrases, we looked for representative anecdotes, or recurring evaluative portrayals, that typify the portrayal of Salinger, his missile theory, and Internet "news" information as reliable or suspect in credibility.
The sample of online messages for this study included 67 electronic mail messages posted on two listservs, CARR-L and SPJ-L, between November 8, 1996 and April 30, 1997, which were found by searching for the keywords "Salinger" and "TWA." The two listservs, CARR-L (Computer-Assisted Reporting) and SPJ-L (Society for Professional Journalists), were selected for analysis because both were (and continue to be) prominent and well-subscribed journalistic discussion groups known to generate active debate about contemporary journalistic issues. The time period from November 8, 1996 through the end of April 1997 was chosen because the online discussion was, for all intents and purposes, finished by the end of this (approximately) six-month period.
The online discussion of Pierre Salinger's assertions began on CARR-L on November 8, 1996, shortly after Salinger made his speculation public. Discussion began on SPJ-L the next day. A journalist on CARR-L treats Salinger's theory as plausible, suggesting that the story about his theory was being suppressed by several major news organizations:
Did anyone notice the Pierre Salinger story Friday 11/8 about TWA 800 and the so-called "Navy Test missile" mistakenly shooting down flight 800? AP ran with the story, but ABC radio net did not, even though Salinger is retired from ABC. We called NY ABC news-room and were told "higher ups have told us NOT to run the story." They gave no reason other than to say "the powers that be, said not to run it."
Very interesting. Salinger claims to have documents. They could be the same ones that have been on the Internet recently.
Frank Haley KKOB Albuquerque, NM USA. (Haley, 1996)
In this initial query, there is evidence of a suspicion that "the powers that be," Salinger's former employers, or perhaps government officials, are trying to silence Salinger, and perhaps cover up some government wrongdoing.
Similarly, many of the other initial online responses to Salinger's assertions demonstrate acceptance of the plausibility of Salinger's theory, and suggest that he is credible because he has a reputation to uphold, that he has "inside" connections, and that the press has perhaps been too trusting of official government sources:
Do any of you out there think there's truth to this Salinger disclosure about the Navy missle and TWA Flight 800? My thoughts are:
- just because "the proof" has been floating around on the Internet doesn't mean it didn't originate from a truthful source;
- why would Pierre Salinger make this up/risk his rep on this, don't you all think he still has some connections? It seems like they (we, I guess I have just taken the FBI's and NTSB's explanation, chewed it and swallowed. (I'm usually not this cynical, really)... (Kart, 1996)
This source points out that information is not automatically wrong just because it has been posted on the Internet—indicating that at this point, the Internet already had a suspect reputation for truthfulness or reliability.
Others added evidence to the suggestion that there might be a government cover-up. For example, a Norwegian journalist said that his brother had heard the same story Salinger was advancing a month earlier at a TWA office in Norway. His brother was told that the story was being covered up because of upcoming elections in the United States (Husoe, 1996). Similarly, others suggested that "French intelligence" sources were substantiating Salinger's theory, and that it would have been dangerous for Salinger to make these kinds of claims in the United States—presumably because the U.S. government would have him "silenced." Still others reminded their peers that this theory has been discussed and dismissed previously, but that it might be time to take another look at it, in light of Salinger's reputation (Ward, 1996):
Salinger is a reporter, a good one, and a political insider. He knows how the Secret Service works having worked in the Kennedy administration. He also knows a rat when he smells it, having worked during the tumult following the JFK assassination. Sure, he had the "document," but it was clear from his comments that he carefully corroborated most of the information therein before going public. (Carroll, 1996)
While some came to Salinger's defense by highlighting his journalistic credentials, others began to case doubt on his theory. In subsequent posts there is evidence that Salinger's theory competed against other possible explanations and crash theories. One message even suggested that the cause of the crash could be a meteor (da Silva, 1996). Other voices began to remind the list that Salinger's theory and its defenders were beginning to sound like "conspiracy theorists," implying that their talk was the same as that of paranoid, gun-toting, government-suspicious militia members who warn of black helicopters. One discussant said it was "scary" that people believed this story just because "Pierre Salinger says so" (Huffaker, 1996a). Those who posted these kinds of "reality-check" messages often argued that information on the Internet is of dubious news value and questionable veracity.
Fairly quickly the discussion began increasingly to use professional terminology, as some journalists began to question the professionalism of Salinger's reporting and the Internet as a news source, asking for verifiable proof (Nowlin, 1996). Others suggested that making accusations without offering proof was like Joseph McCarthy's "red-baiting" of the 1950s (Stough, 1996). Another said the story was "smirked at until this Salinger guy started talking about it" (Varley, 1996). Others soon began saying the whole episode of Salinger making these accusations was ridiculous because of their improbability and his lack of evidence, and they began accusing Salinger of being gullible (Reeves, 1996). Some methodically discredited Salinger and the Internet by inserting subtle clues about his record as a truthful journalist. One dredged up an old story about Salinger—that he lied about the reason for canceling a JFK press conference, calling him, "Mr. Pierre 'JFK has a cold so is canceling today's meetings' Salinger" (Burstein, 1996).
Then, journalists began pointing out blatant factual inconsistencies in Salinger's assertions—he evidently claimed the missile was fired from a Navy ship, then changed his mind and said it was fired from an aircraft (Elly, 1996). Others began mentioning his age, and questioned his veracity by pointing out how Salinger had changed his story in several different ways:
Let me get this straight. The former ABC Paris bureau chief pulls an unsigned letter off the Internet that has been around for two months and presents it to the world as an official government document?
He then acknowledges that he did NOT receive the document from a U.S. Secret Service agent, as he had first told everybody, but that the REAL source was: an unidentified Frenchman?... "involved in various government things"?...who had met a U.S. agent???
Merde alors! I've suspected for a while that Pierre Salinger is a twit, but this is preposterous. And if you guys had any good reason to give Joe Klein hell, Salinger should be toast. (Cunningham, 1996)
Others noted that "Salinger's theory" was actually an old theory that had been seriously considered by the traditional press in the first weeks after the crash. That is, the missile theory did not seem far-fetched right after the crash, and the FBI considered it viable for a period after the crash (Kramer, 1996). Eventually, the evaluative portrayal of Salinger and of the credibility of information from the Internet and traditional journalists' professional duty to squelch rumors reappeared. Several discussants asked the listserv to consider the facts in the case, not just the reputation of the journalist making the claims:
I think that this is an important point for the whole industry to understand. A story, no matter how credible, will have a hard time becoming mainstream unless a "name" embraces it. On the other hand, a story that is totally incredible becomes a sensation when a "name" reports it as fact. Only because Salinger is a "name." I don't think it would have received as much attention had Colin Powell made the claim, because he is not a "name" in the media, though he conceivable would have more access to Pentagon insider information. (Huffaker, 1996b)
Some discussants began parodying the whole debate, such as the likelihood that an entire ship full of sailors would keep quiet about a missile launch, or that perhaps the sailors did not hear the missiles being fired because, "I hear they have silencers on those missiles now. Read it on the Internet," one joked (McLeod, 1996). The listserv discussion had reached the stage where Salinger's journalistic credibility was being parodied by other journalists. Importantly, it was not only Salinger's reputation as a journalist, but the Internet as a news source that was being framed as "deviant."
More than two months later, some journalists on the discussion lists continued to defend Salinger: "It has not yet been demonstrated that Salinger was 'led astray.' ... To assert that Salinger's statements were wrong without accompanying evidence is pure conjecture at this point" (Carroll, 1997). But other discussants continued to parody Salinger. For example, in response to a posting about the urban legend of "kidney thieves," who allegedly steal your kidneys while you are drugged unconscious, one discussant said, "I figured it was urban legend when it was whispered to me by Pierre Salinger who said he got this straight from French intelligence" (Cubillos, 1997).
Eventually, the majority of the online journalistic community framed Salinger as a deviant, or a shorthand for incompetence, i.e., "Salinger's conspiracy theory" (Kramer, 1997), tarring Internet news credibility with the same brush. For many journalistic listserv discussants, Salinger and Internet news were now regarded in the same category as "urban legends," "black helicopters," and "conspiracy nuts."
Poor Mr. Salinger got suckered by conspiracy theorists and games players of the "black helicopter" variety, many of whom gather in the Usenet newsgroup alt.conspiracy. Luckily there are others adept at probing urban folklore also in Usenet, who have made Lucky Pierre a laughing stock this week. I hate to blow my own scoop, but l'affair Salinger will be the subject of my column for NYTNS this week. (Stough, 1996)
The Traditional Media Discussion
In contrast to listserv discussants, conventional journalists framed Salinger's contention as groundless from the beginning. The first hard news reports primarily used "official" quotes to discredit Salinger:
After Mr. Salinger made his allegation last week, James Kallstrom, the head of the New York office of the FBI said: "We have totally and thoroughly investigated all aspects of the so-called 'friendly fire' theory, and have not found one scintilla of evidence that would indicate any involvement of U. S. military forces in this tragedy." (Van Natta, 1996)
The official quotes used by journalists were liberally spiced with defamatory adjectives about Salinger, and cast the FBI and other federal agencies as having a level of professionalism that Salinger lacked. This is one characteristic that differentiated the traditional print media rhetoric from the on-line discussion groups: The traditional media seemed to give greater weight to official sources and explanations, while, in the beginning at least, the on-line discussants often seemed to give equal weight to independent sources. In the following account, Salinger allegedly told journalists that he had proof, but refused to let anyone see his proof:
James Kallstrom, FBI associate director leading the criminal investigation said: "We have double-checked and triple-checked ...to assure ourselves, beyond a reasonable doubt, that no military component or asset not only was not involved, but was not in a position to be involved." An obviously angry Jim Hall, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board called Salinger's allegation "unfortunate and irresponsible" and blamed it for causing confusion among the public and "consternation and pain" among the families of crash victims. Salinger appeared to backpedal Friday, telling reporters in France that the document, dated Aug. 22, was posted on the Internet in September. He showed journalists two crumpled pages that he said was the document but refused to let them examine it. (Anderson, 1996)
Within days of the news stories about Salinger's allegations, editorialists and columnists began to portray Salinger as unprofessional, naïve, and gullible. They began to attack his journalistic savvy and stereotyped his theory as similar to other bogus conspiracy theories:
For retired veteran ABC newsman Pierre Salinger, it was an on-line humiliation, a bogus story he got off the Internet and bought hook, line and sinker about the Navy being responsible for the July 17 explosion of TWA Flight 800 over Long Island. When shown a copy of the dubious document by a CNN news crew in France, Salinger, 71, said "Yes, that's it. That's the document. Where did you get it?"
The allegations about CIA involvement in drug sales likewise have received substantial media coverage, as have the reports of black helicopters, and other militia allegations.
[M]uch of the noise caused by Salinger's report and the other Internet-bred confusion could be avoided by hewing to time-tested journalistic principles. (Coates, 1996)
Journalists were now holding up Salinger's previously reputable journalistic credentials as suspect, particularly alluding to his work as President Kennedy's press secretary. They began to insinuate that Salinger was misusing his position as a prominent journalist by lending credibility to rumors, and ridiculed the Internet as a source of news.
At first it sounded like big news: a veteran journalist and ex-spokesman for President John F. Kennedy said he had a document showing that TWA Flight 800 had been shot down by the Navy. Theorizing about plane crashes is nothing new, but it used to be called gossip. Now it takes the form of E-mail or Internet postings, and it has a new credibility. With Mr. Salinger's reputation behind it, the story had such an authoritative aura that the Federal officials leading the investigation felt compelled to appear at a news conference to deny it. (Wald, 1996)
Thus, conventional journalists began the process of cultural authority in earnest: closing ranks, attacking Salinger's journalistic professionalism, and implying that he was using bogus information from the Internet to do damage to innocent people. Salinger and the Internet were depicted as unbelievable, while U.S. government investigators appeared trustworthy and professional:
Like most merchants of conspiracy theories, he is often short on facts. Mr. Wanzenberg, interviewed by investigators recently as part of the continuing probe, said he was as impressed by their professionalism as he was unimpressed by Mr. Salinger's performance. He called it a "type of hucksterism." Or, one might say, a type of friendly fire. (Purnick, 1996)
One of the crucial differences in the way the story about Salinger's theory was depicted early on in the traditional media was the implication that nothing on the Internet could be believed or trusted. To be sure, a number of listserv discussants also cautioned fellow journalists to question information retrieved off the Internet. From the beginning of the debate, however, journalists from the conventional print media tended to portray the Internet as untrustworthy, perhaps even illicit. Salinger was guilty of the worst sin of journalism, gullibility, but the Internet was outside the cultural boundaries of professional journalism altogether:
It turns out the supposedly secret document Salinger says was slipped to him by an in-the-know French intelligence spook was claptrap flotsam that has been bobbing around on the Internet currents for weeks. Certainly the media explosion, its new vents often unstaffed by sober gatekeepers, is a vast petri dish for growing foul cultures. (Teepen, 1996)
Mike Royko, the Chicago Tribune's acerbic columnist, succinctly delineated the journalistic cultural boundaries which now excluded both Salinger and the Internet:
Pierre Salinger has now joined those of us in the news business who have been taken in by something phony from the gossipy world of the Internet. For unlucky Pierre, it was a world-class blunder because it instantly became a world-wide story. If Salinger were just a computer nerd yapping in a coffee shop, nobody would have paid attention. It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an "information highway," but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies. (Royko, 1996)
In this heated climate, another newspaper columnist raised a call for future trepidation about the Internet as a source of credible news:
Salinger's silicon-born chagrin is merely the latest outbreak of the disturbing new information-age phenomenon of bogus news, one that is coming under increasing scrutiny by social scientists, lawyer, and academicians. America is awash in a growing and often disruptive avalanche of false information that takes on a life of its own in the electronic ether of the Internet, talk radio and voice mail until it becomes impervious to denial and debunking. (Coates, 1996)
Newsmagazine journalists likewise used editorial license to strip journalistic credibility from Salinger by listing his past errors:
In the early 1980s, Salinger claimed the Carter administration bungled opportunities to free the American hostages who were held in Iran. Later he charged that the U. S. tricked Iraq's Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait in 1990. And he floated a baroque theory that Pan American Flight 103 had been blown up over Scotland in 1988 because a U. S. drug-enforcement sting had gone awry, allowing terrorists to put a bomb on the plane. So far, however, his shoot-from-the-hip brand of journalism seems only to have increased public confusion-and cynicism about the government and the media. (Dickey, 1996)
The conventional media concluded the final stage of discrediting Salinger and the Internet as a news source by linking Salinger to "gossip," "whipped facts," factoids," and "unfacts," and attacking his character:
Salinger's newest theory isn't original, but it's catnip to conspiracy buffs. In the absence of a conclusive explanation, the Internet has whipped facts, factoids and un-facts into a froth of conspiracy theory. If he's wrong about the missile theory, he says, it would be "the first mistake I've made since the 1930s or early 1940." One hopes the official investigators on the case are driven by a more humble attitude. (Lacayo, 1996)
Editor & Publisher's Evans wrote that Salinger forgot the old journalist's adage that "sometimes it's better to kill a story than to be killed by a story." Evans noted that this was a day when "the profession of journalism looked awfully amateurish" (Evans, 1996).
Political cartoonists eventually began to lampoon Salinger, implying that he was washed-up, out of luck. For instance, a Jeff MacNelly editorial cartoon on March 16th entitled "Fright Simulator" showed Salinger playing the "TWA Flight 800 Game" on his personal computer, and yelling "Mayday! Mayday!" into a telephone (MacNelly, 1997). Salinger and the Internet had become fully deviant, outcasts, and a danger to the cultural authority of professional journalists.
This analysis has examined and evaluated how one particular historical episode, the Pierre Salinger/Internet debate, proceeded in both the online and conventional media. The media rhetorical content generated by the online and offline resources provided the "symbolic equipment" drawn on by the researchers. When viewed together, the mainstream media and listserv dialogue reveal the methods by which ethically engaged journalists were attempting to retain the cultural authority of the traditional media, and refute the news content provided by Salinger and the Internet.
Our analysis indicates that those in the mainstream media were especially vociferous in casting Salinger as the patsy in a national farce, and condemning the Internet as a non-credible news source. Newspaper editorialists and columnists like Mike Royko, in particular, rallied to the defense of the cultural authority of traditional media during the Salinger incident. Similarly, some journalists participating in the online journalistic community sided with mainstream journalists, berating Salinger and treating Internet-generated "news" with suspicion and even hostility.
Symbolically, in this historical analysis, both mainstream and listserv discussants constructed and maintained "cultural" boundaries against both Salinger and the Internet using the rhetoric of identification and exclusion, such as "unprofessional," "unreliable," and "gullible." A perhaps telling remark is the way the story about Salinger's theory was depicted by a listserv discussant as a "closing of the ranks" against Salinger.
This analysis appears to lend credence to Reese's (1990) notion of an entrenched professional community that systematically "repairs" its hegemonic journalistic paradigm by discrediting rogue journalists and rogue media conduits as anomalies. In this example of paradigm repair, journalists online and offline cautioned other journalists to question information they found on the Internet, and to question the wisdom of journalists, such as Salinger, who utilize information from the Internet.
Implications for the Future of Traditional Journalism
This historical analysis lends credence to the notion that the Internet, as a news source, was early on perceived by many journalists as "deviant," and outside the boundaries of their cultural authority. L'affaire Salinger solidified this perception. Moreover, many journalists continue to perceive the Internet as an unreliable source. A recent example of the cause of their concern occurred when a Brazilian student spread false information on the Internet, asserting that CNN videos of Palestinians celebrating after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the U. S. was really Persian Gulf War-era file footage from a decade earlier. The video that aired on CNN and other networks was in fact shot by a Reuters TV crew in the hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Yet with no further corroboration or elaboration from others, Carvalho's e-mail dispatch dashed around the world at a speed only the Internet can offer. Within 24 hours, the story had spread so extensively that the St. Petersburg Times began to organize a news series to discredit September 11 rumors such as this one (Callahan, 2001).
At the same time, other findings suggest that whether journalists are prepared or not, technology is fast eroding the previous presumption that the Fourth Estate possesses an exclusive constitutional mandate, or what Haiman (1999) calls the "monopoly of traditional media coverage." Increasingly, mainstream journalists face an uphill struggle. As Friedman (1998) argues,
[i]n the age of satellites and the Internet, of course, the mechanics of transmission are changing rapidly. The proliferation of instant, globally accessible news sources, in fact, offers the utopian promise of a way out of the compromises of objectivity. As the cramped column space of the newspaper is replaced by the unlimited bandwidth of the World Wide Web, perhaps univocal objectivity can give way to a polyphonous public sphere. Rather than journalists sorting through information to cull kernels of fact, viewers and readers could become empowered to more directly engage and assess information. (p. 327)
One recent innovation, weblogs, or "blogs," offers a particularly potent challenge to the cultural authority of traditional journalism. A weblog is a Web site of personal or non-commercial origin that uses a dated log format updated on a daily or very frequent basis with new information about a particular subject or range of subjects. The information can be written by the site owner, gleaned from other Web sites or other sources, or contributed by users. Furthermore, a weblog may track headlines and articles from other websites. Blogs are typically maintained by volunteers and are often devoted to a specific audience or topic.
Dave Winer, CEO of Userland.com, celebrates the non-professional nature of weblogs and their nearly revolutionary potential to supercede traditional media as news gatekeepers:
We're returning to what I call amateur journalism: created for the love of writing, without expectation of financial compensation. This process is fed by the changing economics of the publishing industry, which is employing fewer writers and editors. The Web has taught us to expect more information, not less, and that's the sea change the Times faces: how to remain relevant to a population that can do for themselves what the big publications won't. Bored readers are looking for alternatives, but because the paper is limited in its number of writers, it can't branch out to cover other angles. My bet says the tide has turned: Informed people will look to amateurs they trust for information they want. (Winer, 2002)
Others, however, particularly journalists, are not yet persuaded. Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of New York Times Digital, speculates against the blog phenomenon surpassing the primacy of traditional news sources, employing much of the same rhetoric that condemned Salinger and the Internet in our historical analysis:
Readers need a source of information that is unbiased, accurate, and coherent. News organizations like the Times can provide that far more consistently than private parties can. Besides, the weblog phenomenon does not represent anything fundamentally new in the news media: The New York Times has been publishing individual points of view on the Op Ed page for 100 years. (Nisenholtz, 2002)
Ironically, rather than fighting the blog phenomenon, a number of news organizations are beginning to incorporate blogs as part of their news content, including The New York Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Boston Globe, the Congressional Quarterly, the Guardian in the United Kingdom, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
As a final point, it is possible that traditional journalists may be overly concerned about the Internet surpassing traditional media as a source of credible news. Overall, US respondents reported that they considered Internet information to be as credible as that obtained from television, radio, and magazines, but not as credible as newspaper information (Flanagin & Metzger, 2000). A more recent Pew Research Center for the People and the Press Survey (2002) reports that while the numbers are down somewhat from 29% in 1998, one in five (21%) Americans give their local daily newspaper high marks for believability. The Wall Street Journal rates higher: 33% say they can believe most or all they read in that newspaper. And while television news viewership has fallen off in recent years, credibility ratings for the major TV news outlets have remained relatively stable. As was the case in 2000, 1998, and 1996, in 2002 CNN was rated the most believable TV news source. Roughly four out of ten Americans who were able to rate it (37%) said they could believe all or most of what they see and hear on CNN, and more than a third of those able to rate them said they believed all or most of what the broadcast network anchors, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings, had to say. This suggests that even as their authority is increasingly dispersed over the Internet, mainstream journalists continue to enjoy a prominent status in society, authority as agenda-setters, and cultural authority to define what is news.
Thus, future computer-mediated communication research should include a continuing examination of the cultural authority of traditional journalism and perceptions of Internet journalism's credibility, especially as media convergence draws the two inexorably closer.
All misspellings and typographical errors in the original e-mail messages cited have been retained in this article.
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is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Texas/El Paso. His research interests include new media communications, media ethics, intercultural media effects, and journalism/communication education. His work has been published in Communication and Terrorism (Ed. Bradley S. Greenberg), Hampton Press, and in journals such as Communication Quarterly, Convergence, Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Mass Communication & Society, and Southwestern Journal of Mass Communication.
Address: Department of Communication, University of Texas/El Paso, Cotton Memorial Bldg., University of Texas/El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968 USA
is Communications Program Coordinator and Associate Professor of Humanities and Communications at Penn State Harrisburg. His research interests include Visual Communication and Media Ethics. He is the author of Mapping the Cultural Space of Journalism: How Journalists Distinguish News From Entertainment.
Address: School of Humanities, Penn State Harrisburg, 777 W. Harrisburg Pike, Middletown, PA 17057 USA