We Want Media

Place yourself in this situation: You're a journalist and you think you have a story that would stir up alarm among the public. You go out and start interviewing people that could provide you with information related to your idea -- but one interviewee reveals information that will dilute the effectiveness of your story. What do you do now? Apparently one journalist put into that situation decided to leave out the information that she believed would "harm" her story and run it anyway.

ABC's Action News section ran a news story on Nintendo's Nintendo DS handheld system warning parents about the potential danger their children could be in with the system's wireless capabilities. However, apparently they decided to ignore the information given to them through an interview they had with David Long from GamerDad, a website to help inform parents on videogames to promote safety on the hobby.

ABC Action News' Nydia Han ran a story that talked about the dangers of Nintendo DS' wireless abilities now that the company has released its internet Wi-Fi service. David Long revealed that he had been interviewed for this article by Han. Long told her about the safety measures taken with the Nintendo DS.

According to Long, he had to tell Han multiple times that PictoChat couldn't be used over the internet and even received a call-back asking him whether or not it could be used over a Wi-Fi hotspot. Long responded that the program couldn't connect to the internet. GamerDad and David Long never made it into the final piece.

Quite simply, ABC Action News did not skip out on facts and mislead people because they didn't put in time to research on it, they decided to purposely skip out on the facts because they apparently thought it harmed their story. While they did not specifically say in the story that the DS' Pictochat feature is Wi-Fi enabled (which is isn't), they still implied that by mentioning that the area has a wireless hotspot during the mentions of Pictochat.

Sorry, I don't think that mentioning the actual range of the chat program in the last few moments after basically implying that it can go over the internet throughout most of the piece really fixes things.

I guess there's a new journalist trick in the book now. If the research is done and something uncovered helps to dilute the original idea, then the plan is to ignore that it was ever found. A fine day for journalistic integrity.