They can pull media's leg until it falls off

Every bunko artist counts 

on the victim to help make the con.

The hoax as a media phenomenon has been around a long time.

Damn MSNBC for falling for an election campaign scam. But don’t guilt the cable guys into thinking such things have never been done before.
A guy came into a newsroom where I once worked. He had some highly credible story. It relied on every newspaper’s drive to break a big news story.
In other words our own newshound tendency outweighed the actual facts.
Every bunko artist counts on the victim to help make the con.
His tale relied on him and him alone. He nimbly turned aside every attempt to identify someone who could collaborate. But we could trust him, he said, and wasn’t he standing right there in front of us?
He’d even be willing to stay in town — at our expense — until we published the expose. That way we could hold him accountable.
Asking for financial backing of course was his undoing.
All I had to do was Xerox his fake driver license and fax it to “the authorities,” I told him. That convinced our confidence man to skedaddle.
Election facts and myths flew helter-skelter before the Barack Obama election punctuated it all. A blog and false identity were behind a wavelet of deception about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. She supposedly didn’t know Africa is a continent, according to a claimed leak inside the John McCain presidential camp.
When so much was being said bizarrely and so much being supposed imaginatively about the VP candidate to nowhere, you can palpably feel the drive to go on air without verification.
The New York Times parsed the fraud ever so gingerly a week later. The Times wasn’t so absolutely sure the explanation of the prank wasn’t a deception too. Remember the old Mad Magazine’s spy vs. spy?
If it’s to be believed, two “obscure filmmakers,” the newspaper said, concocted the ruse with a Web site connected to a fictitious think tank.
The tricksters earlier had gulled The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.
In another exercise in sophomore humor, someone printed a spoof of The New York Times announcing the end of the war in Iraq.
Ask it. You’re already thinking it: Is truth no longer sacred?
Never was. Never will be. That’s the answer to that.
The ruse we have with us always.
The age of the blog, of the hack, of the wannabe triply guarantee it.
Sometimes it’s for laughs. Sometimes it’s for ego. Sometimes it’s for money.
The continental Palin sting was supposed to help pitch a television script concept.
But I suspect there’s something in the head of some people who’d find an excuse to put one over on media types anyway.
We’re asking for it all the time. Because we value an exclusive break on a big story more than we do waiting for the driver i.d. on the swindler to show up bogus.
The only antidote to the practical joke is fact checking every item broadcast, published and digitalized.
Do I think the media will adopt the absolute cure absolutely?
Nope. That you can bank on.