Newsletter #390 Preview: The Consequences of Posting Fake Stories
May 20th, 2007When someone writes about “the good old days,” it ages them. It means they’ve been around long enough to have survived another era. For me, I still remember when you couldn’t get away with one-tenth of the nonsense that has become the stock and trade of today’s shock jocks, but when it comes to yellow journalism, that’s existed for ages.
But the most damaging episode of the past week didn’t come from a news source with a reputation with gossip above facts. In fact, Engadget is supposed to be a pretty responsible information source, so when they published a story about the possibility of major delays in the delivery of the iPhone and Mac OS X Leopard, people listened and believed.
Indeed, Apple’s stock price took nosedive, losing a billions of dollars in value in the space of just a few minutes, as the news spread to the ends of the planet. Or at least those portions of the planet where investors cared about such things.
The story allegedly emerged from a source inside Apple, and apparently looked authentic enough to elude Engadget’s fact checkers, so they published the report, and all hell followed!
Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.
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If Engadget actually has “fact checkers”, the question of whether or not the information “looked authentic” would not have mattered. They would have CHECKED! They didn’t.
As many good things there are about blogs and ‘news’ on the internet, it’s not ALL good. The proliferation of BS and mis-informed opinion being spread as “news” and “fact” – like the old game “telephone” – is the bad side.
“Journalism”, whether in MSM or on the internet, needs standards of ethics and responsibility that can be relied on.
Does anyone have a Samsung SGH? Dont get me wrong, it’s a pretty nice mobile because it has lots of features for music and video but I still need make it more fun. I already enjoy adult moble tv which is exciting but i want to add more stuff.
I mean there are ringtones and backgrounds that I can add on my phone but is there anything other that that?
After all, my phone was pretty expensive.
-Jeffery
Hi there, I am getting a large number of students that can’t access the internet. When they log on and open IE they don’t get the default web page or a log in screen. It appears to be random, I have tried setting up new user accounts but this also appeasrs to be hit and miss on whether they get access.
Any ideas?
Cheers
Alan
Merry Christmas to all… and to all a good night.