The Story of a Non-Story
How a bunch of media outlets got their coverage of an obscure Massachusetts bill really, really wrong.
This lengthy and meandering tale is ultimately about nothing, but along the way might prove instructive for anyone wondering why so many people walk around with their heads filled with a vast, expanding trove of untrue nonsense.
I begin at the endor, more accurately, at the point when I stopped merely rolling my eyes at this episode and wanted to start strangling people. That point was Sunday afternoon, when a news item appeared on Boston.com, declaring that Republican Richard Ross of Wrentham has filed a bill to prohibit someone who is going through a divorce from having sex in his or her own home.
As I began writing this Monday morning, that article (written by a Boston.com staffer with a Globe.com email address, and with a Globe Newspaper Company copyright, for whatever that currently means) offered no source, citation, link, or hint of any kind suggesting that it was cribbed from someone elses reportingit appears, as written, to be the original discovery of reporter Jack Pickell. That would be some mighty coincidence, that he stumbled upon the same obscure, dormant bill that had by chance been repeatedly posted about and spread across the internet for the previous 48 hours.
In fact, the original version of Pickells story did reference and link to a BostInno article posted Friday afternoon. When someone sent an email to Pickell alerting him of an error he had inserted while lifting the item, Pickell corrected the mistake, but also removed the BostInno reference and link. (Clarification: I did not intend to imply that Boston.com removed the link to BostInno deliberately to avoid giving credit. Also, I should not have used the word lifted, which implies something stronger than I intended.)
Boston.com is hardly alone, however, in offering no indication of prior origin of the story. BostInno provides no clue that I can find for its discovery, although its post appeared, surely not by coincidence, a few hours after the first report that caused me to eyeroll as it crossed my Twitter feed around midday Friday. Three days later and no hint of provenance accompanied the reporting of the story early Monday morning on MSNBC, in between items on Nate Silvers Senate predictions and Jimmy Kimmels interview with the Clinton family.
Before continuing back toward the storys point of origin, I want to clear up some things about the bill that can be misunderstood by those who make no effort to determine whether they are understanding them correctly.
Contrary to what you might gather from phrases such as proposed by state Senator Richard Ross, Senator Richard J. Ross proposed, and If Massachusetts State Sen. Richard J. Ross gets his way, Ross did not sponsor the bill, and he does not support it. In fact, the bill has no legislative sponsors, no support, and is in no way under consideration by anybody.
The Story of a Non-Story