Wednesday, October 04, 2017

Too Soon To Say?

Apparently, a Puerto Rican cop has accused the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz Soto of intentionally stifling relief efforts in order to make the president look bad.

http://www.snopes.com/is-san-juan-mayor-relief-efforts-trump-look-bad/

At the time of my writing this blog post, Snopes is still researching the truth of these claims. While they are representing all of what they know, and the truth has yet to be determined, what are the ethics of publishing these claims before the research is done? Most people don't read past the headlines, so one could argue that Snopes is helping "fuel the fire" of misconceptions about this situation.



But, at least Snopes is looking into the truth of these claims, while other news sources are happy to post controversial headlines for the clicks. The mere possibility of these claims having any merit spurred this reaction from one user on Truthfeed, evidently directed at mayor Yulín:



People with grammar this bad do not need another excuse to go off. While many people do understand the language used in the Truthfeed post makes sure to express uncertainty saying that it's a "claim" from an "alleged" cop, many other readers have already decided that this is the truth! I doubt they'll be checking back to see if Snopes debunked the claim, or maybe they wouldn't believe it if Snopes debunked it because they've already decided to believe something false because it goes along with their political ideology. That's what's so ethically dangerous about reporting these things before the whole truth is known, not everyone is going to understand the nuances of journalistic language, they are just going to pick up on the juicy keywords and react to that instead. 

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