Planting Bad Info In the News Is Much Easier Than You Think

It shouldn’t be this easy for false information to worm its way into mainstream news reporting.

But it is.

Several news outlets and polling aggregators were embarrassed last week after a new polling firm, Wedgewood Polling, was revealed to be a hoax operation. The firm had produced dozens of fabricated voter surveys mostly favoring Democratic candidates, many of which were scooped up by the political press and rolled into official analysis and commentary.

Wedgewood now claims it was merely conducting a social experiment to show how easily phony data can enter into election coverage. The victims of the Wedgewood hoax are many, including Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, USA Today, and Newsweek. Not even the New York Times escaped unscathed: it removed 15 of the baloney polls from its tracking page and issued an editor’s note.

The Wedgewood incident is, unfortunately, not unique. It is representative of a much deeper, more serious problem in media. Bad information, whether deliberate or accidental, routinely slips into mainstream reporting, touching subjects well beyond midterm elections, and often shaping political beliefs, health decisions, and even legislation.