Journalism Ethics needed for Weblogs


News Flash: Osama Bin Laden is NOT captured!

Stay tuned folks for more breaking news stories from Blogcritics

Here is another story about intellectually challenged bloggers. The Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Small.axr was spammed in various flavours including the following message 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”.

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

Well DUH!

Blogcritics boasts thousands of readers per day, and one can only shudder at the thought of how many others who read the post may have been encouraged to click on the attachment and got infected.

As you will recall it was bloggers who first blew the whistle on the Dan Rather debacle that ended his career as news anchor for CBS.

Now that sites like Blogcritics are official news items, it only seems reasonable that responsible journalist should be expected of them as well.

It goes both ways don’t you think?

Cheers, and safe surfing.

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