New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said in a speech on Friday that Twitter breaks news before media outlets but that along with the news you get “propaganda, lies, and general nuttiness.”
Thompson said that “we know in advance” where the “really big breaking story” is going to appear first.
“Twitter and sites like it,” he said. “They usually beat us all.”
“And yet the problem with Twitter is you don’t just get the news, you get everything else as well: uncorroborated but potentially precious eye-witness testimony and citizen journalism, but also rumor, speculation, disinformation, propaganda, lies and general nuttiness,” he said.
The comments come one day after the Times posted a correction on one of its stories about a video smuggled out of Syria that shows seven Syrian soldiers being executed.
“An article on Thursday about the brutal and ruthless tactics adopted by some rebel groups in Syria misstated the date of a video that showed a band of rebels executing seven captured Syrian soldiers,” the correction reads. “The video, which was smuggled out of Syria by a former rebel, was made in the spring of 2012, not April 2013.”
An image from the story was the lead photo of the September 5 print and the story was one of the few that were presented above the fold.
Thompson was in the United Kingdom on Friday giving the speech at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
