Castrodale: Mike Wise and the Very Big Twitter Fib

Despite spending the preseason throwing the football with less accuracy than a fussy infant flinging its pacifier, the Arizona Cardinals have named Matt Leinart as their starting quarterback for their Week One opener against the St. Louis Rams. The selection of the former USC standout ends several weeks of competition with Derek Anderson over who’ll be on the field getting grass stained and who’ll be on the sidelines angrily tapping a pen against a clipboard.
Read that paragraph again. It’s one hundred percent fiction; faker than anything James Frey ever typed in one of his made-up memoirs. It’s also just as false as what longtime Washington Post sportswriter Mike Wise did on Monday, when he pulled a completely untrue sentence out of one of his orifices and posted it to Twitter, pretending that it was real news. On his radio show later that day, he admitted that the reason for his faux-tweet was to “prove that anybody will print anything,” an excuse that is weaker than one of Leinart’s passes. His bosses at the Post agreed, giving him a thirty-day suspension, which should give him time to pick up the broken shards of his credibility.

The parade of inaccuracy began on Monday morning when Wise posted “Roethlisberger will get five games, I’m told” to his Twitter page. Forty minutes later, he followed up with “Can’t reveal my sources.” The tweets referenced the fact that the Pittsburgh QB is already facing six games on the sidelines after allegedly assaulting a co-ed in the bathroom of a Georgia bar. It seemed believable enough that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell might release him a week early, especially considering the info’s source. Several websites — including the Baltimore Sun and NBC Sports’ own Pro Football Talk — ran with the story, giving full credit to Wise.
Before anyone had time to follow up on the story, Wise outed himself as a Jackass-style prankster on his own D.C.-area radio show. The fact that he was willing to make up a story to do it proved that he’s just a jackass, period. His Roethlisberger tweet was, I’m assuming, supposed to prove some kind of point about the untamed wilderness of the internet or the laziness of ‘amateur’ journalists who are willing to staple anything to their websites, regardless of whether or not the stories are true.
The hoax didn’t work for a number of reasons, which the Post’s own Liar, Liar may have noticed if he wasn’t extinguishing his burning pants. First, Wise discounted his own credibility, which is surprising considering the amount of arrogance it takes to attempt a stunt like this. Wise is an established reporter, one who was well-respected until, oh, seventy-two hours ago, and the kind that Michael Keaton would’ve played in a mid-90s film adaptation. His resume includes both the New York Times and the Washington Post — two of the most highly regarded broadsheets in America.
Perhaps even more significantly, Wise discounted and disrespected his current employer. Anyone who believed his tweet — whether they reposted it, wrote about it, or otherwise tucked it away in their brains — didn’t necessarily do it because of who he was, but because of who he works for and because of what the famous font of their masthead means to journalism. The Washington Post has 133 years of experience and a stack of Pulitzers big enough to hide a Honda Civic in. They’re the paper of Woodward and Bernstein, the ones who sent Nixon and his oversized jowls off to an early retirement. If they — through one of their employees — say that Pittsburgh’s bloated quarterback will be dumbly staggering around the backfield by Week Five, why wouldn’t we believe them?
The Post responded by suspending Wise for a month. “Fabrication is a major journalistic transgression,” WaPo ombudsman Andrew Alexander wrote on his blog. “He’s lucky he wasn’t fired.” (It seems like Wise would’ve known this; he shared the New York Times newsroom with Hall-of-Fame fabricator Jayson Blair back in 2003). Matt Vita, the Post’s Sports Editor, quickly reminded their staff about the paper’s guidelines for Twitter and other online interaction. “When you use social media, remember that you are representing The Washington Post,” he wrote in a memo. “This is not to be treated lightly. The same standards that we apply to ourselves in the newspaper … apply to the world of social media. Most fundamentally, we need to be accurate.”
In an interview with Dan Levy of the Press Coverage blog, Wise proved that he still doesn’t get it. “I picked a lousy way to show we have no credibility in this medium, in the social networking medium, and that nobody checks these things out. [...] If I had to do it all over again, I would have picked another way.”
But that’s the thing. Mike Wise does — or did — have credibility, as do other news outlets who use Twitter to break stories, to link to features and to give more frequent updates than either a print edition or an official website may allow. In the four years since it fell out of Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone’s brains, Twitter has evolved from a handful of users answering the question “What are you doing?” to a ubiquitous international service with 190 million monthly visitors who tweet an estimated 65 million messages every day.
It’s probably easier to name a news source that doesn’t have a presence on Twitter than it is to list the ones who do. For example, the Weather Channel has spent the majority of the week stocking its Twitter stream with information about when Hurricane Earl is going to start making out with the North Carolina coast. That’s not credible, Mike? Because you may want to explain that to the OBX residents who spent the morning nailing down everything from their deck chairs to their dogs.
As for “checking these things out,” the sites that published Wise’s one sentence crapstream did by citing him and noting that he was a journalist for the Post. That’s the way you do these things; you tip the frayed bill of your hat toward the original source then track down the details for yourself. Of course, none of us expected his story to be only slightly less believable than The Berenstein Bears Learn About Strangers.
Mike Wise has spent years earning a reputation among his readers, his coworkers, and his colleagues as one of the best sportswriters on the east coast. It took him less than 140 characters to lose it.
***
Jelisa Castrodale is a writer and comedian who has learned a lot about life by making a mess of her own. She chronicles her failures at The Typing Makes Me Sound Busy, and twitters while she waits at stoplights. Castrodale was featured in the book Twitter Wit and was named one of Mashable’s 10 Funniest Twitterers. Contact her at jacastrodale@gmail.com.
Also by Jelisa Castrodale …