Monday, October 19, 2009

The fringe media have no fact checkers

Reuters, CNBC, the NY Times, and Washington Post all fell for a left-wing hoax: the left-wing group, the Yes Men, issued a fake press release that pretended to be from the US Chamber of Commerce announcing an unlikely reversal of the Chamber's policy on cap and tax. No one at any of those "prestigious" news organizations thought to check the facts before running the story. The hoax was exposed when a real Chamber of Commerce official disrupted the fakers at a pretend "press conference."

In related news, drops in circulation are forcing the New York Times to lay off 8% of its newsroom staff. (The Wall Street Journal is now the largest newspaper by circulation, indicating that there are some benefits to being a paper with some measure of editorial balance.)

2 comments:

The Cunctator said...

To be fair, Fox Business Network also fell for it.

John said...

True.

They were slightly better though: if you watch the video, you see that they correct it within seconds because, unlike the other news agencies, they had a staff member calling the Chamber asking for comment.

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