Imagine that in 20 years a sports historian, researching previous cricket world cups, retrieves the pieces written at the time about the 2007 tournament. Almost every article will start with a heavy-hearted paragraph about the futility of blokes hurling leather at wood in the shadow of the murder of Bob Woolmer.
Let’s hope that the electronic librarian in charge of that archive will have added a link to later coverage suggesting that the Pakistan coach in fact died of natural causes. And — because the subject of this piece is the importance of journalistic caution — perhaps also the even later headlines that will assert that perhaps there had been a killer after all.
But the point is that, if Woolmer turns out not to have been murdered, hundreds of thousands of printed words and tens of hours of bulletins and phone-ins will become historically unsafe. The same is true of the swaths of paper, cyberspace and airwaves given over to lamenting a new low in reality television — a Dutch programme in which renal patients compete to win a kidney — which, unfortunately, proved to be a hoax. Equally problematic for posterity are the many moralistic commentaries inspired by allegations about the private life of the newsreader Jon Snow, which were later exposed as inventions.
Present-tense journalism has always been vulnerable to future events — for example, those British newspapers that praised the “firmness” of Germany’s new leader in the 1930s — but the turnarounds currently seem to be happening more regularly and spectacularly, and raise troubling questions. Should the BBC retract the edition of Panorama that stated authoritatively that Woolmer was poisoned, or simply pretend that the show was never broadcast? Most online libraries place warning flags on everything printed in the belief that the Dutch handed out transplants through light-entertainment formats?
Excerpted from Mark Lawson comment in ‘The Guardian’, June