Wednesday, March 29, 2006

"When computers do the news, hoaxes slip in." | csmonitor.com

~~ It is a case of the good with the bad. As pointed out in this article below , alternative news sources-- who would get limited or zero exposure in print & broadcast -- have a ready forum on the Internet.

Yahoo! News contains regular content from "The Nation ", "the Weekly Standard" and loads of other smaller "alternative" news sources, which i know i only read regulary,
because they are on the 'net.
As far as weeding out the truthful from the falsehood,
It is simply, let the reader beware with news.

Hoaxes are nothing new in the creations of the human mind.
The Internet does not create hoaxes. People create hoaxes using the Internet.
The good thing is : That BECAUSE of the Internet's freedom of thought and speech, hoaxes do not last long, but are quickly dispelled. ~~ TP
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When computers do the news, hoaxes slip in | csmonitor.com:
"Lack of human involvement is why hoaxsters love Google News."
| Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

"But while press releases and satire are labeled as such, Google News doesn't give users information about the difference between the missions of, say, a respected newspaper and a website devoted to political diatribes.

Publicists and activists aren't the only people interested in using news aggregator sites to their advantage. Earlier this month, another fake press release made its way onto Google News, this one falsely saying comic actor Will Ferrell had died in a hang-glider accident.

'In the old days, to perpetrate a hoax and get it in front of the eyes of the millions of people, you had to be in the media some way or have access to a reporter. Nowadays, literally anybody can do it,' says Alex Boese, author of 'Hippo Eats Dwarf: A Field Guide to Hoaxes and other BS.'

Google News and its rival sites offer pranksters a forum that seems legitimate, adding credibility to fake stories, Mr. Boese says.

Indeed, Internet users worldwide started buzzing in 2003 when a story appeared on Yahoo News about the arrest of a time traveler on charges of insider trading. The story was from a tabloid newspaper called the Weekly World News that is infamous for its casual relationship with truth."