Conventional news is a tough business these days. The erosion of ad revenues and the fragmentation of audiences have bankrupted many papers and seen a fundamental change in the ways news is gathered and presented.

Monday night’s episode of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show opened with a critique of CNN that was triggered by the news network ‘fact-checking’ a Saturday Night Live sketch that was critical of President Obama.

Stewart and his team looked at CNN’s poor record of fact checking on its own programs.

Fact checking is the function of news. That is the public service they provide.

CNN isn’t alone; a lot of news outlets aren’t doing that kind of fact checking. Where is the critical analysis of numbers, checking methodology.

Too many interviews on CNN end with “We’ll leave it there” as Stewart showed in rapid succession. Too many misleading studies are just being “left there” without appropriate critical analysis.

I can relate to this segment from The Daily Show.

Are “facts” going to be determined by the loudest voices or majority opinion?

A quick look at a Wired story about a new internet statistical report led to a number of tweets proclaiming the decrease in relevance of P2P traffic. Successive re-tweets added commentary – not all accurate.

The first asked if anyone would tell the CRTC:

P2P is sooooo 2007. Hopefully someone will tell the #CRTC. http://bit.ly/1QjIs3

A few re-tweets later, we saw a re-tweet, dropping a couple syllables in “so” and adding commentary stating “study finds big drop in P2P traffic”:

P2P is so 2007. Hopefully someone will tell CRTC.[study finds big drop in P2P traffic] http://bit.ly/1QjIs3

That one got re-tweeted with another editorial addition:

So does this mean Rogers will drop the bit cap? study finds big drop in P2P traffic] http://bit.ly/1QjIs3

But, in reality, there was no drop in P2P traffic reported in either the study or the Wired article. The article spoke of a drop in the proportion of total internet traffic, with P2P file sharing dropping from 40% in 2007 to 18% today.

To look at P2P traffic totals, you need to see what total internet traffic was doing in that 2 year period. According to a recent report on a Telegeography release, total internet traffic is up 188% (up 79% in 2009 and 61% in 2008). As a result, total P2P traffic appears to have actually increased 25% in the 2 year period – hardly a “big drop”.

Smaller than average growth is not the same as a decrease. Will someone tell the CRTC that little factoid?

Twitter’s 140 character limit shouldn’t mean a sacrifice in accuracy.

Commenting on the efforts of Google Inc to build a massive digital library, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said the Internet should not be exempt from copyright laws.

The German government has a clear position: copyrights have to be protected in the Internet

Last year, I posted a story about France acting on hate content being imported over internet networks.

Are Europeans going to lead in treating digital and conventional content within a technology neutral legal framework?

Last week, I identified some of the problems with the recent broadband study released by Oxford University’s Saïd School of Business.

My colleague, Suzanne Blackwell at Giganomics identified some other problems. Most fundamentally, the study did not account for end user self selection of service delivery speeds. For example, although the service provider infrastructure may support 50Mbps download service, the user may have only subscribed to a 5Mbps service which would set a limit on the measured speeds.

A spokesperson for Cisco, the project funder, was quoted saying:

It can be a bit misleading to look at the rankings. The important thing is whether the broadband quality of a country is good enough for today’s needs and the UK falls well within this category.

We forecast the UK will improve because of things such as cable networks being upgraded and the Digital Britain report focusing on next generation access.

The same holds true for Canada.

The study contains an important message. In creating an index, the Broadband Quality Score (BQS), a report in eWeek Europe says the study examines the need to balance between penetration and the nature of the connectivity.

In that article, Cisco’s internet business solutions strategy director Fernando Gil de Bernabé said:

Penetration and quality have a different impact on socio-economic factors. Policy-makers need to make a decision based on that – and may have to choose between penetration or quality.

The errors in the data used in the Oxford report (which should have been obvious to some of the more outspoken Canadian industry critics) make the rankings more than “a bit misleading.”

But, the message about balancing interests is an important one – it is the headline that should have been picked up.

There is a need for a more informed discussion to help lead broadband policy development. Read our report [pdf, 944KB], or at a minimum, read our press release.

In my post yesterday, I included a quote from Barack Obama that merits further attention.

Obama is arguably the most net-savvy world leader, having leveraged new media tools to energize voters and donors in the last election. But, even he has expressed concerns about the impact of new media on the quality of information being delivered and discussed by the public.

I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.

This remark seems to tie into a posting I wrote last May, when I referred to Twitter as Coffee Crisp. That posting in turn provided a link to Nick Carr’s piece in Atlantic Monthly called “Is Google Making Us Stupid“.

For a generation raised on-line, how does in-depth analysis and solid information get funded? How can “serious” writing, news, stories hope to be heard above the noise?