CORRIGAN HAMMOND
The Silhouette

HAMILTON (CUP) — On Feb. 18, someone on Twitter reported that Gordon Lightfoot was dead — which meant, as these things often do, that suddenly dozens of media outlets around the world, worried about being caught off guard, quickly picked up the story and ran with it.

It turns out, though, that despite the Canadian folk legend’s striking physical resemblance to the Crypt Keeper, the story was a little premature. And it was Lightfoot himself who broke that story. Lightfoot (or an undead spirit purporting to be him) in the ultimate example of citizen journalism, fired off a quick phone call to Toronto’s CP24 news network and announced that, contrary to popular consensus, he was in fact alive.

Ever since the website TMZ practically beat doctors to pronouncing Michael Jackson dead last summer, such reporting has become standard fare for mainstream news outlets. Now that’s not to say that death hoaxes haven’t been around for years — Paul McCartney, after all, has spent the majority of his professional career cracking jokes to interviewers about a pesky little rumour that he died in 1967. But mainstream media always veered away from that sort of story. If Walter Cronkite was going to announce that Paul McCartney died, someone at CBS damn well had better have checked his pulse!

Even at sensationalist outlets like CP24 News, misreporting something like that used to be considered career-ending grounds for dismissal. It’s a shame that’s no longer the case.

In the week following Michael Jackson’s death, various news outlets reported that Miley Cyrus, Ellen DeGeneres, Jeff Goldblum, Harrison Ford and Britney Spears had died. All that it takes for a celebrity to be considered dead these days is a 14-year-old kid with a laptop, a Twitter account and enough time to say that someone croaked. And there’s something very scary about that.

We live in an age where we have the greatest access to the greatest amount of information in the fastest amount of time in all of human history, and our most trusted news outlets can’t even be bothered to fact check a story before going to press.

A generation ago, we expected that our news outlets wouldn’t report a story until they had verified that it was, in fact, a story. Maybe we wouldn’t know that some B-list actor was dead until the evening news came on or the paper boy threw a copy of the newspaper onto our front porch — but damn it, when someone said that Gordon Lightfoot was dead, Gordon Lightfoot was dead.

Now, in a world of 24-hour news networks, where everyone is a “citizen journalist,” this old business model is too slow for our go, go, go lifestyles. We expect our news to be instant and we don’t give a flying fuck if that instant news turns out not to be news at all.

Remember the Balloon Boy last summer? Now, we can probably all agree that that particular story was, in fact, non-news. Imagine what would have happened if CNN hadn’t gone live, though. It would have been a ratings nightmare for the “most trusted name in news.”

I would love to have seen Walter Cronkite’s response if someone in the CBS newsroom had pitched that to him in his hey-day: “So here’s the story, boss. Some weirdo in Colorado made up a story about his kid being stuck on a weather balloon.” That guy would be dropping a resume off with The Dick Cavett Show the very next day. Fast forward 30 years or so, and make that same pitch to Wolf Blitzer, however, and things go differently.

One of the most memorable scenes of the Emmy-winning series Mad Men is when the entire office gathers around a tiny TV set to watch news coverage of a plane crash. That was set in 1962, and not many passenger jets had crashed at the time. Back then, people expected their news to be newsworthy. Nowadays, not so much.

That scene plays out on a daily basis in our world every time anything trivial happens anywhere. And every single time a major news outlet carries trivial news, we, as a society, grow collectively dumber. The next time Gordon Lightfoot doesn’t die, I don’t want to hear about it.

Oh, and this just in — according to Twitter, Robert Zimmerman is dead.

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photo: Wikimedia Commons