# 4562
When you search for news online, as I do each and every day, you quickly learn that 90% of the sources out there are the Internet equivalent of carnival sideshow barkers.
Step right up folks, that’s right . . . come closer. Inside this tent, for just ten cents . . . yes, one thin dime, one-tenth of a dollar . . . you can see the 8th wonder of the world . . . Little Eva and her dance of a hundred veils . . . . you’ll see her shimmy, folks . . . you’ll she her shake . . . that’s right, step right up . . .
And if it isn’t Little Eva doing the same old grind, it’s Digby the Dogfaced boy, the remains of Judge Crater (my nod to obscure history buffs), or the Big Pharma suppressed natural cure for bird flu.
It’s all about traffic, getting people inside the tent - often under false pretenses - to generate ad revenue or sell products.
I use an RSS Feed reader to pull thousands of news stories to my desktop every day, from various legit sites like the NIH, CDC and HHS, and off Google Alerts by various key words such as vaccine, H5N1, pneumonia . . .
And every day I weed through hundreds of dubious news stories, blog posts, and twitter tweets that are either recycled old news (some intentionally presented as new), are pseudo-news items filled with improbable conspiracy theories or unbridled speculation, or are simply wild tales made up out of whole cloth (see Ukraine And The Internet Rumor Mill).
Add to that the propensity for news aggregators to accidentally pick up and recycle old newspaper stories (it happens often), and the landscape for bloggers, news gatherers, and those looking for good quality information online becomes a dangerous minefield.
Nearly every one I know who writes or posts in Flublogia has been fooled at least once by one of these recycled stories.
The original publication dates are often hidden, or missing entirely, and it is simply impossible to remember every news items that has come over the transom over the past five or six years.
Three such `phantom’ stories that have appeared this week are:
B.C. to extend bird flu quarantine Canada.com 06:18 Mon, 10 May 10
Bird flu re-emerges in China, Vietnam, 1 dead Ottawa Citizen - Business 00:25 Mon, 10 May 10
Bird flu survivors could face brain disease risk Ottawa Citizen - Business 18:08 Wed, 05 May 10
The problem being that the first two stories are from January of 2009, and the third is from August of last year. I don’t know exactly why these stories keep showing up on the news aggregator sites, I just know it happens.
More insidious, and harder to identify, are old stories that have been rewritten and presented as new . . . with a fresh date . . . and little to indicate their true age.
Today’s little rant is inspired by just such a story picked up by my RSS feed reader. One with an evocative headline, designed to pull people to their page (I’ll spare you the url, and provide a screenshot instead).
This headline stresses the immediacy of the situation, as Bird flu Now carried by household flies, and the date is today’s; May 11th, 2010.
Who wouldn’t click on this link? I certainly did.
The only problem, of course, is this story almost certainly dates back to January of 2007. You can read a nearly identical report in my blog from more than three years ago entitled Cats and Dogs and Flies, Oh My!
The story is legit, at least. Which is more than you can say about a lot of what passes for `news’ on the web.
It is based on actual research conducted by a veterinary pathologist at Gadjah Mada University in Yogayarta, Indonesia. And we’ve seen other research that lends some credence to it, as well (see Houseflies Revisited)
But it’s old news.
There’s nothing wrong with revisiting an old story, of course . . . as long as you identify it as such. But frankly, we’ve heard very little about this research since it first came out.
If houseflies are a vector for bird flu, there isn’t a lot of evidence showing that they are particularly good at it.
There are good sources of information out there and I outline many of them in my essay Reliable Sources In Flublogia.
These writers and websites have a proven track record of due diligence and intelligent reporting and they are the sources I tend to go to when researching a story.
Nearly every day I get emails forwarded to me from well intentioned friends who want me to know about the latest `alarming’ story that someone sent them.
Warnings about AIDS infected needles hidden in gas pump handles, `knockout’ perfume samples handed out to unsuspecting women in parking lots, and the government’s plan to levy a tax on every email.
Some of these hoary hoaxes have been around so long they have three chevrons on their sleeves, and are easily recognized. But if it’s new, I go to snopes.com or some other fact-checking site to see if its legit.
Most aren’t.
I endeavor to do the same sort of fact checking on news stories before I post them on AFD, and will often hold off on stories until I’m comfortable with them. If that means someone beats me to it, well . . . this was never intended to be a `breaking news’ site.
I’ve no ads on this site, sell nothing, and have no financial incentive for drawing visitors like bird-flu infected flies.
So getting it right is far more important to me than getting it first.
But no one gets it right 100% of the time, no matter how hard they try. Which is why Caveat Lector remains a good policy for everything you read online.
Even on this site.
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