Fumbling over fakes

The media is having trouble preventing fake stories, by its own employees and by Internet mischief-makers.

There’s no standard protocol for preventing plagiarism or fabrication, Craig Silverman of the Poynter Institute reports. A Hearst paper in Connecticut, the Boston Globe and Toronto’s Globe and Mail all were embarrassed by fabricated stories in 2012.

As for outside fakers, they set up fake web sites that look like the real deals and package them with fake Twitter accounts that corroborate the fake stories.

It has the legitimate media running in circles to cover a fake story. For real. 

To read the entire article, click on http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/regret-the-error/199146/plagiarism-fabrication-and-hoaxes-marked-this-year-in-regret-the-error/