By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 18, 2006
The great thing about the Internet is that anyone, even a lonely 16-year-old girl, can record her thoughts and draw a big following.
The maddening thing about the Internet is that she might not be lonely or 16.
If you spend time on the Web, you probably know that the latest cult hit on YouTube -- which seems to generate a new sensation every few hours -- was Lonelygirl15, a shy, angst-ridden teenager who blabbed for months about her life, family and boyfriend in videos that seemed strangely slick.
This set off a nationwide hunt for the online star "Bree" -- plus spinoff satires -- before the terrifying truth emerged: Bree was a fake, a fraud, a cyberscam. She was a 19-year-old actress named Jessica Rose.
It gets worse. The scheme was cooked up by a trio of buzz-seeking California filmmakers, who have since signed with Creative Artists Agency. Rose landed on "The Tonight Show."
Still, this might serve as a case study in how the Net polices itself. Other YouTube contributors made videos questioning, for example, how a Lonelygirl15 fan site could have been set up before Bree's first posting. One video morphed her into the devil. And it was blogger Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher -- with help from his son -- who followed the e-mails (today's version of following the money) and unmasked Rose, a graduate of the New York Film Academy, as the real Bree.
Foremski writes that the scrutiny offers a "media model for the future: a mediasphere that uses the best qualities of professional media combined with relentless pursuit of information by citizen journalists. That's a potent formula that bodes well for our society, IMHO." ("In my humble opinion," for you Luddites.)
But the lesson here is not just that skillful flimflam artists can fool the world, at least for a time. It's that things online are not always what they seem, as creeping commercialization changes the culture.
The alluring aspect of YouTube -- where the Lonelygirl15 soap opera remains online, in perpetual reruns among the 100 million other videos -- is that anyone with a camera can play. Even though YouTube has struck promotional deals with the likes of NBC, it remains a Wild West frontier where someone with a message, a cool dance move or a silly stunt can rustle up a crowd.
But distortions are all too easy to pull off. CBS News asked YouTube last week to remove a video that changed correspondent Byron Pitts's report on attitudes toward the Iraq war by adding a 90-second interview with a retired colonel that was posted on the network's Web site, even though only a snippet of the interview had actually aired. That altered the nature of the story, CBS argued, and YouTube complied.
Post-it-yourself video sites feature the good, bad and breathtakingly ugly. YouTube has dozens of videos -- set to music and with Arabic logos -- purporting to show American soldiers being killed in Iraq. These appear to be lifted from jihadist Web sites, one expert told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
YouTube's shield of anonymity can be politically useful. No one knows who posted the footage of Tramm Hudson, a white Republican House candidate in Florida, saying: "I grew up in Alabama, and I understand . . . that blacks are not the greatest swimmers or may not even know how to swim." (He lost.) Was it subterfuge by a rival candidate?
The promise and the peril of online communications extend to the blogosphere. It was a blogger, Harvey Levin of TMZ.com, who broke the story of Mel Gibson's drunken, anti-Semitic rant after the actor was arrested in Malibu. But some mainstream journalists are still learning the ropes. Writers for the Los Angeles Times and the New Republic were suspended recently when they engaged online in "sock puppetry" -- posting comments under pseudonyms that either assail their critics or heap praise on themselves.
What YouTube and social networking sites like MySpace.com and Facebook have in common is that they eliminate the media middleman. Musicians, comedians and other artists (not to mention the date-deprived) can sell themselves to other people without having to convince a journalist that they are worthy of ink or airtime. Unfortunately, the old media establishment too often paints this world as dark and dangerous -- "What Parents Need to Know About MySpace," says a U.S. News cover story -- while playing down its fun and creative aspects.
Foul play -- even in the guise of allegedly lonely teenagers -- is always possible with no referees. But amateur detectives, it turns out, are pretty good at busting fakers.
Playing Hardball With Chris MatthewsThe phone call that ultimately led to the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was triggered by his anger at Chris Matthews. And therein lies a small peek at how Washington works.
In the summer of 2003, according to the new book "Hubris" by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Libby -- then Vice President Cheney's chief of staff -- was upset over Matthews's criticism of the Iraq war. Libby had Adam Levine, a White House spokesman who once worked for Matthews at MSNBC's "Hardball," call the host to complain.
In the call, which the book says led to a shouting match, Levine said that Matthews had been harping on the role of Libby and other neoconservatives who, Levine noted, have Jewish-sounding names. "Some of what you're saying about this sounds anti-Semitic," Levine told Matthews.
In an interview, Levine confirms the call. "The sole purpose of making the phone call to Chris Matthews," he says, "was to try to correct what I believed and Scooter believed were incorrect statements Chris was making" linking Libby to a passage in President Bush's State of the Union message about Saddam Hussein seeking enriched uranium in Africa, which the administration later retracted. "I in no way believe Chris is anti-Semitic. I know for a fact he's not."
Matthews says that he was in the forefront of "pointing out the ideology behind the war" and that he knows from his experience in the Carter White House that the vice president's top aide must have been involved in vetting the infamous "16 words" in Bush's address. "It obviously bugged him that I did that," Matthews says of Libby. But, he says, "I don't know Scooter Libby. I don't know what happened between him and the vice president and why that call was made."
After the complaint to Matthews, Libby called Tim Russert, NBC's Washington bureau chief, to ask why Matthews was always taking aim at "Libby and Wolfowitz and Perle." During the investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, Libby testified that he learned about Plame during that phone call with Russert. But after the NBC newsman testified that the subject of Plame never came up, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald obtained an indictment of Libby, who is contesting the charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.
Couric WatchIt didn't take long -- six days, to be precise -- for some critics to start pronouncing Katie Couric's CBS tenure a failure.
After taking the "CBS Evening News" to first place in her debut week, Couric dropped to third last Monday, and rivals declared her surge over. But she won two of the next three nights, and finished second on the other. To be sure, Couric's more feature-oriented approach has stirred controversy, but history shows that news ratings move at a molasses pace.
"I said from Day One I'd be happy with consistent and even slow growth," says CBS News President Sean McManus. "Even being in a race for No. 1 is a pretty darn good accomplishment, a sea change considering where the 'CBS Evening News' has been the last 10 years. For some people, it's an attractive story to say that Katie is back at No. 3, when in reality this is going to be a fight for the next couple of years."
Signs of ProgressSeven-and-a-half months after being wounded in Iraq, Bob Woodruff is spending more time at ABC News and plans to work more regularly in the fall, starting with a report on his ordeal.
"If you haven't seen Bob, you would be amazed," the former anchor's wife, Lee, said in an e-mail that recounted the family's summer at Lake George. "His hair has grown in; he has been playing some killer tennis, driving the boat for the kids . . . doing some Pilates with my sister and playing Scrabble like a fiend. He looks and sounds so much more like himself each week."
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