“Since some folks in traditional media still love to pretend that they are part of a select group of information filters that can provide fact-checked news items and that their internet counterparts cannot, I’m going to keep driving this point home: internet news groups and blogs are no more susceptible to hoaxes than major news media,” Timothy Geigner reports for Techdirt. “We saw a wonderful example of it recently with the Manti Te’o story, in which major news not only bought the BS hook, line and sinker, but through their inaction, actually perpetuated the story. Still, while that was a story that was, at best, a very sad case of someone lying their tail off, some examples can provide a little more levity.”
“Such as, for instance, when the L.A. Times and UPI write up very real accounts of a very fake iPhone case that includes a retractable cup-holder. The kicker being that Network World’s blog dismissed it as a prank days earlier,” Geigner reports. “Despite the pure ridiculousness of a case for a phone where the largest part of the equipment holds a Starbucks coffee cup, the L.A. Times wrote about it in all seriousness.”
Read more in the full article here.