Reality Check Commentary: Facebook Fabulism: If Your Neighbor Says Haitians Eat Cats, Check It Out
Reality Check Commentary: Facebook Fabulism: If Your Neighbor Says Haitians Eat Cats, Check It Out
Decline of local press and rise of social media a toxic combination, says NewsGuard Executive Editor Jim Warren
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Facebook Fabulism: If Your Neighbor Says Haitians Eat Cats, Check It Out
By Jim Warren, NewsGuard Executive Editor
Mike Royko, the newspaper columnist known for his wisdom and wit, and the subject of a new play, learned his craft at City News Bureau of Chicago, a onetime training ground for young reporters. Alumni include New York Times columnist David Brooks, TV journalist Carole Simpson, novelist Kurt Vonnegut, and playwright Charles (“The Front Page”) MacArthur. The bureau’s mantra was simple:
“If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.”
That was not true for Erika Lee or Kimberly Newton, sources of a bogus story that flew around the world, namely that immigrant Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, steal and eat pets. When NewsGuard tracked them down, the Springfield residents conceded they were passing along an unsubstantiated rumor, which still has not yielded any named first-hand source who actually claims to have witnessed the pet eating. Yet the false rumor was claimed as fact by former President Donald Trump during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Lee had posted the third-hand bogus claim on Facebook, the new town square of misinformation, and many just assumed it was fact. “The sad saga in Springfield, Ohio, is a stark illustration of the dangers of relying on Facebook for local news and information,” says Tim Franklin, a senior associate dean of the Medill School of Journalism and John M. Mutz Chair in Local News.
Franklin was at Sunday’s matinee of “Royko,” a one-man show in Chicago about the late journalist whose op-ed column was syndicated in 800 newspapers, topped only by George Will. There was his clear and lean prose, an Everyman sensibility, and an impressive topical range. But, at the heart, there was trustworthy reporting and editing in an age before local media imploded.
With the collapse in the business model for news, more than half of all U.S. counties either have no local news source or just one, according to Medill’s Local News Initiative research. NewsGuard has found that so-called pink slime websites — sites posing as independent news outlets but secretly funded by partisan groups — now outnumber daily newspapers in the U.S. Early research suggests that residents in low-information counties turn to Facebook groups for local information.
“The problem is that these groups don't have local journalists doing what journalists do — fact-checking information, interviewing sources, digging through documents and going to the scene of events,” said Franklin. “As a result, these Facebook groups become vessels for rumormongering and disinformation.”
The Springfield paper, like most local and national outlets, faces the media industry’s decline, and needs to do more with smaller budgets and fewer reporters. It is owned by Cox Enterprises (disclosure: Cox Enterprises is an investor in NewsGuard) and shares staff with the Dayton Daily News, according to Jeremy Kelley, who serves as both assistant editor of the Cox-owned Dayton Daily News and editor of the News-Sun. One reporter is listed as writing for four separate Cox publications.
The News-Sun does not list staff, but there appear to be just a handful, including one whose bio says she covers breaking news for four Cox publications.
“We have a small number of full-time, Springfield-dedicated employees,” says Kelley. “We also have a collection of regular Springfield-focused freelancers. And we also have several full-time employees who write for both the Dayton Daily News and Springfield News-Sun (sister papers).”
But both papers credited NewsGuard with tracking down the two women responsible for triggering the Haitians-eat-pets story. As the Dayton Daily News wrote, “The Springfield News-Sun has made several attempts to contact Lee and has been unsuccessful. But Lee spoke to the site NewsGuard, as did her neighbor, identified as Kimberly Newton.”
My NewsGuard colleagues applied the journalistic skills and technology tools we use to ferret out misinformation and how it spreads to figure out how to identify Lee as author of the original Facebook post. They then spoke to both Lee and Newton. This underscores how changes in media resources can mean a story is no longer the sole province of a local outlet in the way it once was.
“I’m not sure I’m the most credible source because I don’t actually know the person who lost the cat,” Newton told NewsGuard in what became an admission picked up nationally.
Cox’s Kelley did not respond to email questions about the News-Sun’s staffing, and whether the apparently small total represents a decline over recent years. By some estimates, Haitian immigration has boosted Springfield’s population by between 12,000 and 20,000, to around 80,000, in a decade. The Dayton Daily News site lists 33 journalists to cover a city of 135,000.
During a post-matinee audience discussion about Royko and his legacy, the topic of social media, Facebook, and journalistic credibility inevitably arose. Royko died in 1997, Facebook launched in 2004, and I suggested that perhaps he could have adjusted to such a world, with social media perhaps providing a tool for spreading his work and what today we would call his “brand.”
I was diplomatically admonished, and perhaps correctly so, by Carol Marin, a longtime Chicago TV reporter and former news anchor at the CBS, NBC, and PBS stations. Marin, who also was an on-air reporter for CBS News’ “60 Minutes” and “60 Minutes II,” now heads the Center for Journalism Integrity and Excellence at DePaul University, which she launched eight years ago.
"I can't imagine Mike Royko with a Facebook page, harder still to picture him writing in the haiku of Twitter-now-X. Mike was a storyteller, a reporter, a journalist/columnist. Royko was a careful craftsman. Not a curator of clicks. But I'd love to read what he'd say about Elon Musk.”
James Warren is Executive Editor of NewsGuard. He previously served as Washington bureau chief for the New York Daily News.
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