Somewhere along the line, I”m willing to bet you’ve heard the term fake news. Like the news itself, the term is everywhere these days and over the last 48 hours or so there was an incident around a news story that helps to make a great point about business.
You might have heard about the story CNN got wrong. Actually, we’re not sure that they got it wrong but we do know that they didn’t follow their own protocol for vetting information. The story concerned a claim that Congress was investigating a Russian investment fund with supposed ties to The President. For our purposes today, that’s immaterial. What is important is that CNN, like all professional journalism outlets, has standards in place with respect to the number of sources required to run a story (among other things) and this story didn’t meet them. They ran the story (only on their website – it never made air ) and then retracted it after they realized they hadn’t met their own standards. The reporters who wrote the story resigned.
Those standards are what differentiate professional news organizations from the real “fake news” outlets. You know – people who just make stuff up to further their own purposes or who selectively report certain facts to advance their arguments. Those standards are why The Wall Street Journal dismissed a reporter who was doing secret business deals with one of his contacts. And those standards are our business point today.
I always make it a habit of asking “who cares” when I get information. Whose agenda is served by the news? Who is the source? Are there multiple, independent sources on this or is it just rumor mongering? In the CNN case, I take the incident as a positive. The system worked and whether the story is right or wrong is immaterial. It came from one anonymous source, and that’s just not good enough for a professional organization.
When you get business information, you need a similar system of vetting the story. Who cares that you have the information? Whose agenda is advanced? Asking those sorts of questions can save you from having to issue your own retraction or worse. Make sense?
Consult Keith 