What’s the world coming to when you can’t even fake a Tweet anymore without “the man” getting all up in your grill (that’s street lingo for the boss yelling at you)? You know, it wasn’t that long ago that we did a “media test” of our own (to see if anyone would repeat it without verification) and posted a preposterous story about beloved professional golfer and family man Tiger Woods wrecking his car outside his house on Thanksgiving (crazy, huh?), and then planting some fake naughty text messages on his phone to make it look like they were from sluts and call girls . . . and look what happened to that little fib! Wow, is our face red about that one!
But enough about us and how the Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore is so geeked about multiple hurricanes in the Atlantic that he nearly burst that vein in his forehead on the air last night. No, let’s focus on poor little Mikey Wise who writes (or used to write for) something called the Washington Post . . . which I think is a blog hosted on Post Cereals Intranet. Anyway, Mikey wanted to do a test and see how stupid other media types would be if he posted a fake story on his Twitter account saying that Big Ben was suspended for five games this season.
Well, the little experiment when better than expected. Not only did other pick up the story (we didn’t thank God) but he also found out that his bosses at The Post have no sense of humor or scientific curiosity whatsoever. They sited some kind of journalistic integrity (??!) that says this kind of thing ain’t right. (Sounds like someone needs to get on the Interwebs more often.) In the end, the suspended him for a whole month, which will probably into his report on how this whole experiment turned out. Our guess is that HBO will be turning it into a mini-series any day now. Wonder who will play Jim Cantore?
The Washington Post has suspended veteran sports columnist Mike Wise for publishing fabricated information on Twitter. He announced the one-month suspension on his radio show Tuesday.
Wise claimed Monday that he wanted to prove a point about how reporters will run stories in today’s fast-moving news environment without independently verifying the information. So Wise tweeted that Pittsburgh Steelers star Ben Roethlisberger, who has been accused of sexually assaulting a Georgia college student, would get a five-game suspension. Of course, since Wise is a respected sportswriter, other news outlets went with the apparent scoop and cited his reporting.
Washington Post suspends columnist for Twitter hoax (Yahoo News)
