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.

A license to dance

Sophisticated dancers who glide in smooth, fluid syncopation vs. the jerky helter-skelter of pelvic thrusts and flaunted attitude by the newcomers and outliers.

The First Amendment makes a lovely invitation to the journalism ball.

Ask any dancer in the professional news business.
Trouble is, that same person can be a positive busybody about anyone else’s call to be a self-styled journalist.
I’m a constitutional purist about free expression, declared retired Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie last week. He said government shouldn’t license journalists.
But it was no more than a few minutes later in his speech at the Nieman Foundation for Journalists at Harvard. Downie said Lou Dobbs shouldn’t be allowed to broadcast his CNN news program because of his notorious stand against immigration.
Time and again prominent news executives do this two-step. No one can tell them how to behave journalistically. But they would deny symbolic licenses to other practitioners.
Hypocrisy trips merrily at a faster pace in the current splintering of the information industry. Print, cable, online and broadcast standards dance to different sheet music in which a main step is finger pointing at the professional practices of other dancers on the floor.
The boogie beat of citizen journalism especially drives the foxtrot crowd of mainstream media into digital harrumph.
Look, it’s like this: Journalism is either free of interference or it isn’t.
I prefer free.
If you enforce standards of practice for the street dancers, you have to do the same in the ornate ballrooms of news too.
It happens that quite a few amateurs trip themselves up in their own private Roselands. That stumblebum effect is supposed to lower the public’s opinion of all journalists. Such bad ethics shouldn’t be allowed, sniff the slow-dancers.
Yes, well, their disdain takes for granted public opinion of journalism could get much lower.
It’s just as likely the public will award the trophy to seasoned, sophisticated dancers who glide in smooth, fluid syncopation vs. the jerky helter-skelter of pelvic thrusts and flaunted attitude by the newcomers and outliers.
The marketplace of public opinion is licenser enough.
Regardless, it doesn’t matter. Not when you play the constitutional music of the law of the land.
You’ve got to open the floor to the trip-foot amateur and the rowdy intruder if they want to go dancing with the stars.