MEDIA HOAXES AND DUE DILIGENCE
People are easily taken in by scientific, literary, financial and political hoaxes, particularly when they want to believe.
When we search for “truth,” we tend to rely on authority and whether information supplied by the source has been accurate in the past. Serious newspapers, magazines, journals and electronic media sources historically took pride in getting the story right. Reputations could be destroyed and markets lost when a story was shown to be wrong because of a hoax or carelessness.
Nothing illustrates the decline of serious journalism more than the fact that many of the major media, particularly CNN and MSNBC, have participated (and to some extent continue to participate) in massive hoaxes which would have been easily disproved with basic due diligence.













