Honor is Better
NBC chose honor and respect by choosing to delay announcement of Tim Russert’s death until his immediate family had been notified. In so doing Wikipedia and other news outlets broke the news first according to the New York Times.
Does it matter?
It depends who answers that question.
I think NBC chose the right path. Tim Russert was part of their family – let other news organizations do their thing. NBC will have their turn with other news stories. What mattered for this story was their relationship with the Russert family.
Not only that, they chose to walk in the path of the ancient wisdom that says, “A good name is more desirable than great riches; to be esteemed is better than silver or gold.” (Proverbs 22:1). They did the honorable thing rather than pursue the scoop on the news. For that they have earned the respect of a great many people who know about it.
Is Wikipedia less honorable?
According to this same New York Times report, Wikipedia has consistently broken the news about many events, including notable deaths.
I think this is to be expected since this online encyclopedia should be considered the counterpart of neighbors sharing over-the-fence gossip, but in this case among a growing online community. Users of Wikipedia always need to be alert to documentation – to footnotes and sources – to support significant factual claims. Until you see documentation, you might only have gossip. Since all content is user generated and user corrected (though most corrections seem to be done by a small group of users), what you see today may be gone tomorrow if anyone notices the errors.
There is nothing dishonorable in this process when it is done truthfully. It is simply people sharing what they know.When they feel themselves to be part of an online community, they are part of this communication process, and it is part of their identity and how they find a sense of who they are in life as they try to put facts into print together.
This is not how Wikipedia was conceived; but this is what it has become.
For those of us who stumble across such breaking news as someone’s death in Wikipedia, since we would not know to be looking for it, we may still have to wait for mainline news outlets to publish it before there will be significant documentation to establish believable factual claims.
Wikipedia does not currently compete with NBC or virtually any other news outlet in that market. I suspect TV did not play second fiddle to Wikipedia for the two days following Tim Russert’s death.
And I suspect a lot more people saw Tom Brokaw’s announcement than read the Wikipedia entry.
