Caught In Lies: Jimmy's World and the Wafer Caper

     Though not as often as I should, I have considered that the news I'm exposed to may be factually incorrect, and I like to think that I'm good at checking sources to know if something is true or not. I don't consider myself to be someone who blindly believes anything they see on the internet. Most of the time I check the source because I don't want to seem dumb for believing something that was fake. 

     My reaction to the "Wafer caper" as I will be referring to the article about two senior staff members of the Telegraph Journal getting fired over a fake news story was that of shock and a bit of humor. The original story about Harper putting the wafer in his pocket isn't exactly the hardest hitting news story I've seen, and the fact that the paper had to lie about it to run the story is funny to me. Just the fact that it was all fake is a shock to me because didn't anyone bother to fact check before the story was published? The fake story about "Jimmy's World" and the journalist who fabricated the story is more understandable to me. From what little I know about journalism I do know it can be a competitive and stressful environment. What surprises me is that there isn't more journalist who fabricate news to satisfy their editors.

     I somewhat agree with Journalist Jack Shafer's aggression that “most liars make things up for the simple reason that they don't have the talent or the ability to get the story any other way.” While some journalists may be lazy and don't care or put effort into their stories, the pressure of the environment they work in could cause good journalists to do stupid things.

     Given what Shafer says, colleges and universities should make sure graduating journalism students have a grasp on how stressful things can get, but in my opinion no amount of school can prepare someone for how they would react in certain situations. Everyone handles stress differently. There'd be no exact way to prepare someone for everything.

     I think that when conflicts of ethics arise newspaper ombudsmen are a good help. They are good for critiquing and responding to newspapers, as It is nice to have a third party point of view that isn't the general public or the newspaper itself. It sounds like it would help stop biases and things like that.