So, if you’ve been exposed to any news over the past day or so, you’ve probably heard that Keith Richards snorted his father’s ashes. It was originally reported by Britain’s New Musical Express magazine and then got cited all over mainstream news. A quick search in Google News for “Keith Richards ashes” turns up nearly 1,000 results.
Well, guess what, kids? It was a joke. Man, thank heavens these people don’t cover technology; if they did, Twitterati would have gotten venture capital money by now.
A few months ago there was a big uproar because word got out that Apple was suing a company called Podcast Ready, and the reason was supposedly that they were attempting to trademark the word “podcast” and therefore needed to defend it by suing Podcast Ready. This got linked over and over again, to the point where Leo Laporte started referring to his episodes as “netcasts”, and it turned out, thanks to some actual investigation by Rob Walch of Podcast411, that the rumor wasn’t even remotely true. (And even now it hasn’t completely gone away; some podcasts that I listen to regularly refer to themselves as netcasts.) At the time, it was an indictment of the blogging community for not doing their homework and just taking other sources as absolute fact.
Turns out we’re no worse than the mainstream news. I mean, seriously, a story this freaking outrageous and it takes a full day for someone to take the bold step of asking Richards if it was true? And it wasn’t even CNN, NBC News, or the New York Times who talked to Richards’ manager; it was MTV News. Yes, that MTV News, who hasn’t broken a major story since Kurt Cobain died. It seems that the NME reporter didn’t get the joke, and then it spread like wildfire, because if it’s in print, then, of course, it must be true.
This really gives me a lot more faith in the blogging and podcasting community. Sure, bloggers don’t always get it right, but obviously, neither do the “real” journalists. And lazy journalism like this will only help legitimize independent news reporting and media production. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but I enjoy watching some wrongs more than others.
