Tiger Woods scandal blurs lines over fact and fiction

Posted by Jennifer Lush on December 15, 2009 at 3:21 PM

An article on the Washington Post by Paul Farhi has looked at recent media coverage of the Tiger Woods' alleged extra-martial affairs, and pointed out some ethical issues that arise from what appears to be the simple repetition of celebrity gossip in established publications. Farhi writes that whilst: "There's little doubt that Woods cheated on his wife... two weeks after stories about the world's greatest golfer began detonating, much about this story has taken on the coloration of fact without the facts themselves."

Whilst such sensationalist reporting is accepted as common place in tabloid publications such as the National Enquirer, for example, Farhi reports that the uncofirmed rumours have managed to reach the pages of respected titles such as the Chicago Sun-Times, the New York Daily News, the Boston Globe, US Weekly and the Daily Beast website.

"Did Woods and his wife revise their prenuptial agreement in the wake of his extramarital revelations?" asks Farhi. All five publications report that he did, despite the fact there is no actual information to confirm this. That all the publications offer varying time frames and figures about this supposed 'revised agreement' does not contribute to their credibility either: "Has Tiger offered to pay his wife $5 million to weather the scandal (the Daily News), $20 million (the Globe) or up to $80 million (the Daily Beast)?"

Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism says that this repetition of rumour is a result of an overload of available information on the internet. As such gossip gathers steam, the stories become so hot that mainstream media cannot afford to ignore them. "The mainstream media doesn't want to be first on these stories," says Jurkowitz, "They'd prefer to let the supermarket press break these things, so they can remain at arm's length," but they will still cover them. It is at this point that fact and fiction become somewhat blurred.

Brooks Jackson, director of Factcheck.org, told Farhi: "Tips and rumors and leads would be checked out before they got on the air or in print. But when you have the Internet and Drudge [Report] and your crazy aunt Harriet sending you e-mails about every rumor, it's hard for journalists to keep the fences and the gates up. . . . Unsubstantiated rumors wind up reported as fact."

Of course it doesn't hurt that such sensational news often boosts hits to a website, and in a time when many news outlets are trying to increase ratings and visits, reporting on what borderlines as tabloid material could be a result of this pressure.

Online news aggregator The Huffington Post took a particularly sly approach to covering the news, attempting to increase traffic to its page on the Woods scandal by posting the headline: "Tiger Woods Sex (VIDEO)."

"With a title like that, it's sure to draw in icky people expecting--hoping!--to see the Tiger Woods (the golfer) going at it," writes Clint Hendler for the Columbian Journalism Review, "But no. What you'll actually get is four YouTube minutes of a BBC nature doc with a couple seconds of tigers (felines) mating in a setting that doesn't even look all that woods-like."

One comment responding to the blatant attempt to boost visits read: "Sleazy of HP to put this up. Let's use some self control [with] the Tiger scandal." Indeed the decision to publish such a headline does little to encourage the integrity of a publication, and as news organisations edge closer to the tabloid realm in repeating unsubstantiated facts, they risk losing the confidence and trust of their readers.

Source: Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review