It's no Lai!

Credibility

We covered several fake press conferences at CSPA, and for this assignment, we were instructed to involve the multimedia aspect of the news. I posted my videos of the press conferences on YouTube:

And though my peers who wrote Facebook and Twitter updates on the story almost instantly received feedback from their friends (“Where are you getting this information?” was a popular one, as man has certainly not landed on Mars recently), my videos didn’t receive a single comment until yesterday.

“Yea this is an announcement at a building that is not even recogniceable. LOL cut me a break. THere are no cameras and were are the Nasa representetives?”

And though I laughed this off at first, after I thought about it for a couple minutes, this comment is scary, for two reasons.

1) Somebody actually believed that this shaky footage of an unrecognizable scene could possibly be real, and substantiated his accusations with proof, as if I was going to defend it. This is frightening because I realized that there are quite a few YouTube users out there who would defend completely untrue statements.

2) In the highly hostile realm that is YouTube commenting, only 1 out of 30 viewers left an antagonistic comment telling me, in essence, that I’m a stupid idiot who is posting up videos that are clearly not real NASA announcements.

I’m pretty sure that many of the viewers are other CSPA students or friends who know what’s up, but there have to be a couple of people who watched the video, unaware it was an exercise for a journalism workshop, who didn’t bother to tell me off for falsifying information in my video’s title and info box.

Credibility is a huge deal as news comes quicker and quicker at us every day, but it seems as if that issue doesn’t really matter to those 29 other people watching a fake story about a Mars landing hoax.

That, or “cut me a break” guy was the only non-CSPA person who watched the video.

I really gotta start tagging things.

(Gonna be gone from Monday through Wednesday, so no new blog updates until later this week!)

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