ryanm60•6d agoProlific Poster

Found the smoking gun on my own feed after 8 months of digging

I was sitting in my car at a parking lot in Spokane last Tuesday, cross-referencing metadata from a series of local news articles I'd been tracking. That's when I noticed a pattern of timestamps that didn't add up across three different reports about the same protest event. Has anyone else caught news outlets filing stories hours before the incidents they cover actually happened?

3 comments

3 Comments

jana8816d ago

Came across this exact thing last month with a local Seattle station. They posted a story about a city council vote that happened at 10 AM but the article had a 7 AM timestamp. Checked their other stuff and found three more like that. It's not a glitch either because the metadata was clean and consistent across platforms. Really makes you wonder who's writing the news before it even happens.

barbara_grant46d ago

Wow, so the news is literally predicting the future now? Ngl, that's a pretty neat trick for getting ahead of the competition, though maybe a tad unethical. Guess we should all start checking timestamps before we believe anything.

the_drew6d ago

Actually stumbled onto something similar last week with a sports site that had game recaps posted an hour before the games even ended. Checked the timestamps against my own recordings and they were definitely pre-written. What gets me is this is probably way more common than we think, just nobody checks because most articles blend in with the rest. The bigger issue here is how this messes with archives. If pre-written stories stay up with wrong timestamps, future researchers digging through news history are going to get a completely fake timeline of events.