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Erroneous What’s Trending Tweet Suggests The Death of Steve Jobs

What’s Trending is CBS’ attempt at latching onto whatever craze the Internet is enjoying. Naturally, their content comes largely from the social media outlets of the world, which is fine a...
Erroneous What’s Trending Tweet Suggests The Death of Steve Jobs
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  • What’s Trending is CBS’ attempt at latching onto whatever craze the Internet is enjoying. Naturally, their content comes largely from the social media outlets of the world, which is fine and good. Lots of entities provide great coverage of a constantly-evolving environment. The trouble comes along when these reporters, for whatever reason, try to make news, instead of simply reacting to it. When things like that happen, mistakes can be made, and if you’re unfortunate enough to make such a mistake in the land of Twitter, it will not go unnoticed.

    And that’s where the aforementioned What’s Trending comes into play.

    As indicated, the CBS show, hosted by the attractive Shira Lazar, makes its content reporting on various Internet trends. Because of that, anything having to do with Overlord Steve Jobs is the kind of content What’s Trending is attracted to. Perhaps that explains their what boils down to a “Steve Jobs is dead” tweet, one that, much like NBC News’ unfortunate Twitter adventure, caused much blow back.

    Before that, however, here’s a look at your host:

    Shira Lazar

    So yeah, a show that bases its content off of the Internet featuring a cute, apparently tech-savvy host. It’s good to see the Morgan Webb business model is still in effect. Digression aside, covering Internet trends is one thing, tweeting something that requires at least some concrete confirmation, especially when it concerns a figure of such Internet magnitude like Steve Jobs is something else entirely. First, the Twitter account for What’s Trending.

    As you can see, they jumped on the NBC News/Ground Zero mess as well:

    Reports about #groundzeroattack completely false. NBC News (@NBCnews) Twitter account was hacked http://t.co/MYiTAa5 16 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    While the offending tweet concerning Jobs’ death has summarily been removed, it lives on in via the power of retweeting:

    RT CBS tweeted “Reports say that Steve Jobs has passed away. Stay tuned for more updates.” CBS removed the tweet, saying it is unconfirmed. 16 hours ago via Echofon · powered by @socialditto

    Oops. That’s bad. Really, really bad.

    Needless to say, mea culpas were issued:

    Apologies- reports of Steve Job’s death completely unconfirmed. Live on. 20 hours ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto

    On behalf of all of us at @disruptgroup we sincerely apologize for the inaccuracy that was tweeted earlier today.-EP/ Host @WhatsTrending 18 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone · powered by @socialditto

    But by then, the damage had been done. An example:

    @WhatsTrending Does unconfirmed mean “we’re not sure” or “we just made that up and now we’re taking it back”? 20 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    Did I mention the word bad? Because that’s what What’s Trending is experiencing, thanks to misinformed Twitter diarrhea. As for the future of the the show–still in its fledgling status, having launched earlier this year–its Facebook page has under 4000 fans (3,588), and now, their Twitter account took a serious dump on their credibility. That does not sound like the recipe for a successful franchise.

    Now we’ll find out just how magnetic of a host Lazar really is, because at this moment, she’s the show’s only hope.

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