Social media provides new challenges, opportunities for broadcast media, Diane Sawyer tells Club

Television newscasts can co-exist – and thrive – in the Internet age if the networks use the Internet’s resources to create a compelling newscast, Diane Sawyer, ABC World News anchor, told host Marvin Kalb on March 22.

“I don’t see it as a competition with the Internet,” Sawyer said on the latest edition of the Club’s “The Kalb Report.” “We have to be out there creating a unique and important conversation, answering questions in unique and important ways so that you want to come to us.”

Speaking to a capacity crowd in the ballroom that spilled into the Holeman Lounge, Sawyer said that social media is creating new opportunities for broadcast news to understand what people want.

“I cannot tell you how often we hear from Facebook or something coming in on World News tweets a question that you say, ‘of course that’s a question, of course that’s what everyone wants to know,’” she said. “The giant cacophony, the giant democracy, the giant chorus that is the country can sometimes just reach right through to you at the moment you need it the most.”

The impact of social media in shaping world events now is amazing, she said.

“It is impossible not to see and be stunned by the immediate pilot light of hope that goes on when people are hearing from people who are connected to them and will stay online with them,” she said. “ It is a whole new force in the world.”

But it also raises questions of journalism ethics as journalists must struggle with verifying what they are hearing through social media and YouTube.

“We always tell you where we got it,” she said of video the network airs. “Our viewers do know the different frames of pedigree on footage like that.”

But is that enough, Kalb asked? Don’t journalists have an obligation to make sure what they are showing is accurate, not to trust that viewers will be discerning?

“We do call and do our best to verify everything we are putting on the air,” Sawyer said. “There have been many things that might have been electrifying television that we do not put on the air because we cannot verify it.”