Posted on Tue, May. 06, 2008

CNN, the self-styled "most trusted name in news," is about to contradict itself.

The network is beta testing a Web site called iReport.com, a sort of YouTube for news. It's pretty scary stuff.

For about a year and a half, CNN has been soliciting and using audience-submitted news photos and video on its air and on CNN.com. The opportunity is supposed to turn ordinary citizens into journalists. CNN claims that the submitted material is vetted at the same level as its staff-produced material. We can only take its word for that, though so far no outrageous scandal has arisen despite the potential for mischief, or worse.

But iReport.com will be a different animal. The stuff posted directly by any idiot or criminal with a camera and a computer, CNN proudly declares, will not be vetted by anyone; it directly enters the digital world where nothing ever really goes away.

CNN's effort isn't unique (see Fox News' uReport, MSNBC's FirstPerson, ABC's i-Caught). Most outlets in what the blogarchy sneeringly refers to as "the traditional media" are desperately trying to figure out how to dodge a gigantic snowball rolling downhill toward them -- the transfer of attention and money away from them to online sites.

It's a contest of eyeballs. Make an interesting or entertaining enough Web site, and you attract advertisers if you attract the eyeballs. Whether that advertising actually results in sales is problematic, although Google, eBay and others make a rather fine living doing just that.

The movement of advertising away from newspapers, magazines and broadcast compels a response, and iReport.com is CNN's.

"The most trusted name in news" will be providing an outlet for anybody to say anything about anyone at any time, and urging people to use it. This is hailed by CNN's spokespeople as part of the glorious liberation the Internet provides. Makes CNN cool and connected and all that. And makes it party to all sorts of potential harms.

For instance: While you're out of town, someone who means you harm goes to your house, posts one of those "Sex Offender Lives Here" signs and does a feature story about the problems neighborhoods and individuals run into in such situations. Your enemy puts it -- unverified by anyone -- on iReport.com, where the entire world has access to it courtesy of CNN. And if it's done properly, every time anybody Googles your name, guess what they discover about you.

A CNN spokeswoman revealed the vacuous rationalization the network uses to justify what it is doing when she wrote, "It is important to draw a clear distinction between the trusted news and information brand of CNN.com and an unvetted, user-generated community site like iReport.com."

But if iReport.com shows that sign in front of my house, I'm not going to be interested in fine distinctions. It's CNN making money at the expense of my reputation.

CNN has established a valuable brand in news, but it is a brand whose abiding value is truth. Respected news organizations risk their souls when they traffic in less than verifiable truth.

They also risk their fortunes, as I'll explain in my column next week.

Davis Merritt is a former editor of The Eagle. Reach him at dmerritt9@cox.net.