Forty news sites carry the same sentence about a summit, a meeting of world leaders. Not the same story. The same sentence, word for word. It looks as if forty newsrooms went, watched, and agreed.
One agency reporter types a line
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The wire sends it to every site that pays
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Each site pastes it in
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Forty sites carry it within the hour
Most of the forty sent nobody. A news agency did. A news agency is a company that sends one reporter and sells the words to every newspaper that pays for them. People call that service the wire. Forty sites pasted one reporter's sentence.
40 of 40
news sites carrying the same sentence
Forty sites carry the same sentence, word for word. How many people saw the event?
A few. The big sites check each other.
Not yet. They check the wire, and the wire is what all of them are reading. Agreement between copies is not a check.
Forty. Each site has its own reporter there.
Not yet. Forty reporters write forty different sentences. Word for word means one writer, and the rest paid for the words.
Probably one: the agency reporter. The rest bought the sentence.
Right. The identical wording gives it away. Forty sites pasting one wire line is forty copies of one pair of eyes. Nothing in the pasting adds a witness.
Put the journey of one summit sentence in order.
Tap them in the order they happen, first to last. Each tap gets a number.
Right. Nothing in the chain adds a witness. Every link after the first is a copy. The reader's confidence is built from the number of copies.
40News sites carrying the sentence
vsvs
1People who saw the event
Two different things get counted here. One is how many sites carry the story. That is what makes it feel sure. The other is how many people saw it for themselves. A person who saw it for themselves is called an independent source. Copies raise the first number. Only a new witness raises the second number.
How many news agencies supply most of the world's foreign news?
Pick one. Nothing is scored.
Agencies most of the world's foreign news comes from3
Countries in the world195
About 3.Three: AP, Reuters and AFP. AP is the Associated Press, based in New York. Reuters is based in London. AFP is Agence France-Presse, based in Paris. Most foreign stories in most papers on most days pass through one of the three. So most of the foreign news the world reads was seen by one reporter and sold to everyone else.
The numbers are made up. Set how many news sites carry a story, and how many independent sources stand behind it.
100 news sites, 5 independent sources. It feels 95% certain and has been checked about 90%.
A hundred sites with one source, or three sites with five sources. Which is better checked?
The same. A source is a source.
Not yet. The controls move different bars. Sites move how sure it feels. Sources move how much it was checked.
The three with five sources.
Right. Checked 90% and feeling 20%, against checked 20% and feeling 95%. The two bars measure different things. More sites make it feel more sure. Only more witnesses make it better checked.
The hundred. That many cannot be wrong.
Not yet. That many can be wrong together, because they are one story copied. A hundred copies of a mistake is a mistake.
Move both controls.
Four reports. The bar is how many sites carried each; the label says how many independent sources it had. Tap the best checked.
Tap the part of the picture that answers it.
Count the people who saw it, not the sites that carried it.
Report A, one source200 sites
Report B, four sources3 sites
Report C, one source50 sites
Report D, two sources12 sites
Report B, four sources
Right. Three sites and four people who saw it. The shortest bar, and the best checked report on the list.
Report A, one source
Not yet. Two hundred sites and one pair of eyes. The longest bar, and if that one reporter is wrong, every copy is wrong.
Report C, one source
Not yet. Fifty copies of one account. Fewer copies than A, and no better checked.
Report D, two sources
Not yet. Two sources is a real improvement on one, and still half of B.
12 of 100
stories in a hundred that were the reporter's own work
This is not rare. In 2008, researchers at Cardiff University read about two thousand stories from Britain's main papers and broadcasters. Only twelve in a hundred were the reporter's own work from start to finish. Most of the rest began as a wire line, or as a statement sent in by a company or a government department.
Pagescopy
vsvs
Peoplesaw
Count the second, not the first.
So count the people who were in the room, not the pages that carry the sentence. Pages copy. People saw. And a mistake travels exactly like a fact. If the one reporter hears a word wrong, forty pages carry the wrong word within the hour.
Sites that carried the quote40 sites
Sites that carried the correction6 sites
Illustrative.
A general's quote appears on every site, identical. Two days later the agency corrects it: he said the opposite. What happens to the forty pages?
Every site corrects it the same hour. The wire sends corrections too.
Not yet. It does send them. Sending is not running. A correction competes for a slot like any other story, and loses.
The correction reaches a few of them. The wrong quote stays on forty pages.
Right. The wire that spread the error also spreads the fix. But a correction is a small story about an old story, and most sites never run it. The first version is the one that stays.
The sites check with the general themselves.
Not yet. They did not the first time. Forty sites that pasted one line will not each ring a general for the second.
Lesson complete
Forty sites carrying one sentence is one source, not forty confirmations.