Journalism Ethics Needed for Weblogs

(PRWEB) June 6, 2005

News Flash: Osama Bin Laden is not captured!

Stay tuned for more breaking news stories from Blogcritics (http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/06/02/151237.php).

Apparently Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Small.axr was spammed in various messages including the following text that read:

“Turn on your TV. Osama Bin Laden has been captured. While CNN has no pictures at this point of time, the military channel (PPV) released some pictures. I managed to capture a couple of these pictures off my TV. I’ve attached a slideshow containing all the pictures I managed to capture. I apologize for the low quality, its the best I could do at this point of time. Hopefully CNN will have pictures and a video soon. God bless the USA! Stephen Christensen… attachment: pics.scr”.

Blogcritics was actually duped into posting this message as a “breaking news” story about Osama Bin Laden’s capture.

Duh!

One can only wonder how many others who read the post were encouraged to click on the attachment and are now infected.

As you will recall it was bloggers who first blew the whistle on the Dan Rather (http://blog-bloke.blogspot.com/2004/11/cbs-trashes-bloggers.html) debacle that ended with his resignation as news anchor.

Seems to me now that sites like Blogcritics are official Google news items, responsible journalist ethics should be in place for them as well.

It goes both ways don’t you think?

This item first appeared at… http://blog-bloke.blogspot.com/2005/06/osama-bin-laden-is-not-captured.html

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