Journalism 392W: Writing for the Web

BJ Roche, Fall 2008

Why you shouldn’t believe what anyone blogs…

Posted by journal392w-bjroche on November 13th, 2008

..unless you’ve totally checked this source out!

Read this NYTimes piece on how a very savvy blogger pulled one over on the media. The next time you use a website or blog post as a source, ask yourself: how do I know these people are for real??

2 Responses to “Why you shouldn’t believe what anyone blogs…”

  1. Frank Godinho Says:

    I’m actually glad that these hoaxsters pulled one over the media, and MSNBC to boot.

    That channel is the most-biased news outlet in the United States (more so than FOX News in my opinion), and it’s great to see their credibility worsened by these bloggers, “despite ample warnings online about Eisenstadt.” Kudos to them!

    The excess of bias in political journalism is uncalled for, and the fact that several news contributors took the bait shows you just how unprofessional some journalists can be.

    Mr. Wolfrum sums it all up perfectly. “As if there isn’t enough misinformation on this election, it was shocking to see so much time wasted on things that didn’t exist.”

    I couldn’t agree more.

  2. journal392w-bjroche Says:

    Professor Fox showed the film “Wag the Dog” in his political reporting class recently–it’s a great satire on the way the press can be manipulated–and it’s striking for its now-ancient technology: pre-Web, pre-Blackberry, cell phones the size of an NBA player’s shoes, etc. etc.

    We were talking about whether you could pull off a manipulation like that in the age when everything can Googled. Now we have our answer! By the way, check out the Warren Harding Institute website, it’s a masterful piece of hoaxery, in that it’s just close enough to a real ideological website that it might fool you, right down to bidding farewell to their hard-working summer interns…

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