New media: Cure for its own virus?

As technology has broken down barriers of entry to the media, so has it invited new means of deception.

Before last week’s news cycle had wrapped, there appeared on YouTube.com what might be considered, years from now, the first major viral attack of the age of Internet politicking.

A video segment of “The War Room,” D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’ documentary of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, came with a juiced-up audio track and alarming new subtitles.

Timed just ahead of this week’s Indiana primary election, the video supposedly captured Clinton campaign chairman Mickey Kantor belittling white Indianans in excremental terms.

Within hours, the blogosphere was aflutter: Had the clip been doctored? If not, why had it taken 15 years for it to be noticed?

Denials and explanations from Mr. Kantor and Mr. Pennebaker turned up quickly in the Huffington Post and Politico, and soon the matter was settled: Mr. Kantor had been smeared.

The episode raises anew questions about whether sites like YouTube and Flickr — which already have proved their bona fides as video repositories of the past as well as omnipresent chronicles of the present — have a dark side.

Yet the fact that the tampering was discovered — and the controversy extinguished — so efficiently suggests our new media universe comes equipped with prodigious new powers of self-correction.

“The intent of it was disruption — that’s what new media is,” says author and emerging technology expert Joyce Schwarz. “Ninety-five percent of the time, it’s used in a positive way. Then there’s the other 4 [percent] or 5 percent.

“This was propaganda of the worst kind, where you actually lie,” she adds.

Internet campaigning is still in its frontier stage, but it’s growing steadily. According to the Pew Research Center, about a quarter of Americans “regularly” receive at least some information about presidential campaigns on the Web, up from 13 percent in 2004.

Among technology buffs, there’s talk of the increasing “malleability” of digital media.

“Companies like Apple have made strategic commitments to simplify and spread tools for editing video, photos and sound,” says Noah Wardrip-Fruin, a digital-media scholar and assistant professor in the communications department at the University of California at San Diego.

This inevitably will mean a much wider distribution platform for faux- “War Room”-style high jinks.

Nevertheless, new-media boosters calculate that the benefits of wider participation in the media business outweigh the risk of deception.

“There’s a continuity here,” insists David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “We had a greater illusion when there were only three networks and a few great newspapers that the truth was being handed to us and all we had to do was accept it.”

Unlike in journalism’s supposed golden age, Mr. Weinberger adds, “we have an entire population of fact-checkers.”

Then there’s the fact that the mainstream media is far from immune to hoaxes. Think of the “60 Minutes II” controversy involving President Bush’s National Guard records, which more or less ended Dan Rather’s career: It took a phalanx of bloggers versed in 1970s typewriter font-spacing and typeface to uncover the truth.

Looked at this way, new-media sources are vulnerable to the same sorts of fraud as the titanic old guard — only they’re more nimble at self-investigation.

“The Internet has been incredibly good at developing layers to check its previous layers,” Mr. Weinberger says.

The auction site eBay.com enables users to monitor the reputation of sellers, for example, and Amazon.com customers can check previous content written by reviewers of books and CDs.

Mr. Wardrip-Fruin says online communities bring to bear the “remarkably robust,” if imperfect, power of distributed networks. “I had a student try to submit some inappropriately sourced text to Wikipedia last quarter, and it was taken down in hours,” he says.

He goes on: “We see many more examples of people using their video-editing tools to remix and mash-up in creative ways — for commentary and humor — than for deceptive purposes.”

Of course, this means that although they have more say in the creation of media content, average people will have to shoulder a much heavier burden of evaluating the veracity of what they read and watch.

However, just imagine the fun today’s bloggers and amateur Internet sleuths would have had with, say, President Nixon’s Watergate tapes, Ms. Schwarz says.

Lies and hoaxes are a lot older than newsprint, she says.

These days, though, they’re a lot harder to conceal.

New-media boosters calculate that the benefits outweigh the risk of deception.