Should Journalists Bother Checking Sources?
By @edent
· journalism · 300 words · read ~283 times.
OMG WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!111!! 
(Subsequently deleted but still available at Fadah Jassem's tweet)
Let's take a look at the article and see if we can determine if this is a trustworthy source... 
Hmmm... I see "9/11 Truth", "Bilderberg", "Chemtrails" right next to the image. There's a conspiracy corner in the top right. We haven't even got below the fold yet. Now, that's not to say that sites like these don't occasionally break news - but I'm not sure I'd rely on it for accuracy.
The story is, of course, a hoax. Snopes has an excellent write-up demonstrating quite clearly that this is a map of wave height following a tsunami. They even link to primary and secondary sources.
In fact, if the "journalists" had bothered scrolling to the comments, they would have seen many people debunking this story. 
...along with an advert telling people that water, salt, and milk are killing children.
The thing is, it's not a "stupid fake". It's a couple of stupid journalists who fell for an obviously dubious source. Take a look at the image, notice the scale on the right hand side? It is in centimetres which - for those of you without a physics GCSE - isn't a measure of radiation.
Citizen Journalism gets a bad name. But compared with two actual card-carrying journalists, it's not that much worse.
Journalists have a great opportunity to connect with their readers on social media - Alexi Mostrous has over 10,000 followers - but journalists obviously still need the filter of a good editor. Or just some common sense. That is, unless they want to become mere rumour-mongers and let their readers do their fact checking for them.
