by proldic » Fri Aug 12, 2005 12:49 pm
Associated Press Thursday, August 11, 2005 3:53 p.m.:<br><br>Fake News Abounds, but Vigilance on Rise <br><br>By DAVID B. CARUSO <br><br>NEW YORK -- With its official-looking BBC News banner, the Web site looked real enough, but the sick tale it told seemed too preposterous to be true. <br><br>"Lion Mutilates 42 Midgets in Cambodian Ring-Fight," blared the headline. An article followed about a circus-like spectacle that went awry and resulted in many deaths. <br><br> The page was a hoax, but it exploded across the Internet. Soon it was being repeated by bloggers, radio show hosts and a few newspapers. The New York Post published the yarn in its "Weird but True" column on May 20. <br><br> The episode was another in a string of fabrications and manipulations that may be causing people to think twice about what they read, hear or see on TV. <br><br>In recent weeks, Sony Pictures Entertainment agreed to pay $1.5 million to movie patrons duped by advertisements that contained fabricated quotes from a fictitious film critic. <br><br>Two reporters at a small newspaper in North Carolina, the Reidsville Review, resigned after a competitor reported that they had made up quotes for a man-on-the-street opinion feature. <br><br>The Pentagon was embarrassed after a military public relations office issued a press release containing a quote from an unidentified Iraqi civilian that appeared to have been fabricated. Journalists questioned its veracity after noticing that the quote had appeared in a previous military press release. <br><br>There are signs that these fiascos _ and past fabrication scandals involving USA Today reporter Jack Kelley, The New York Times' Jayson Blair, and Stephen Glass of The New Republic _ have led to a more skeptical public. <br><br>The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which conducts regular polling on attitudes toward the media, said that in 1985 about 84 percent of Americans said they believed most of what they read in their daily newspaper. By 2004, that had dropped to 54 percent. <br><br>What isn't clear is whether fabrications have become more common, or just easier to uncover. <br><br>These days, an army of amateur and professional media critics have made a hobby out of attempting to discredit news reports and statements by politicians. <br><br>Their work has been aided by powerful Internet tools that have made it easier than ever to detect stolen or false material, confirm identities or troll public records... <br><br>Robert H. Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University...cited the work of A.J. Liebling, a revered journalist who occasionally embellished feature stories in the 1930s and 1940s with fictitious detail... <br><br>In recent years, fake beheadings and kidnappings staged by Internet jokers posing as Iraqi insurgents or have made their way into newscasts. <br><br>Dozens of television stations were embarrassed last winter when it became public that they had aired government-produced propaganda videos staged to look like legitimate news reports... <br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>
