Both the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror today – among with several others in the US (including the New York Post, which credits the image to AP) and other countries – published an image purporting to be that of the dead Osama Bin Laden. It clearly wasn’t. Any journalist with a drop of cynicism would have questioned the source
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Various parts of the media were hoaxed this week by Belfast student Jonny Campbell’s claim to have won a Twitter internship with Charlie Sheen. The hoax was well planned, and to be fair to the journalists, they did chase up documentation to confirm it. Where they made mistakes provides a good lesson in online verification. Where did the journalist go
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When the telephone first entered the newsroom journalists were sceptical. “How can we be sure that the person at the other end is who they say they are?” The question seems odd now, because we have become so used to phone technology that we barely think of it as technology at all – and there are a range of techniques
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A few days ago status updates like this were doing the rounds on Facebook: “Change your facebook profile picture to a cartoon from your childhood and invite your friends to do the same. Until Monday (December 6), there should be no human faces on facebook, but a stash of memories. This is for eliminating violence against children.” Of course it
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It is always fun when a hoaxed piece of research gets past all the filters and makes the newspapers, but what does it teach us? This is a report from the Hungry Beast team in Australia, “proving” which part of Australia is the most gullible. The answer is, apparently, “the media”.
If you were following the Jan Moir-Stephen Gateley story that was all over Twitter today you may have come across a Twitter account claiming to be Jan Moir herself – @janmoir_uk. It wasn’t her – but it was a convincing attempt, and I thought it might be worth picking out how I and other Twitter users tried to work out
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Good to see final year journalism degree student Todd Nash has his hoax-spotting eyes on. He’s kicked off a new journalism blog with an overview of some pretty obvious photoshopping that managed to get past the people at Sky News: “The best pranks are the ones where the victim has absolutely no idea what is happening and this is true
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