There has recently been a change in UK Prime Minister. I neither know nor care whether that's a good thing. What I do know is that Senior Political Correspondents collectively shat their pants with excitement at being able to breathlessly report any half-baked gossip which would drive clicks.

I saw "Rumours suggest so-and-so will be appointed…", and "Supporters say that A. N. Other will be fired from…", and "Insiders reveal urgent change of policy around…", and so on.

They were all bollocks.

I spent a dull afternoon going through a couple of dozen "sources say" headlines. About 85% were completely wrong. That person didn't become Minister for Administrative Affairs, that other one wasn't fired, the much ballyhooed policy announcement never came.

A few weeks ago, The Economist ran a searing exposé on the accuracy of… The Economist. In an article called "Is The Economist always wrong?" they used a Large Langue Model to test the accuracy of their forecasts. It made for fascinating reading:

We declared smartphones the ­future of computing in 2002, said that something like streaming would devour DVDs in 2008, and cautioned in 2011 that a flood of Chinese-made cars would wash over the West. Still, our techno-optimism occasionally got ahead of itself. Distributed electric grids (boosted by The Economist in 2000), cheap bioethanol (2003), open ­standards for social media (2008) and augmented ­reality (2016) have yet to bring about the breakthroughs we prophesied.

I'd like someone to run the same process on the political rumours reported by the mainstream press. Just how accurate are the tips journalists receive?

Now, obviously, perhaps the rumour was true at the time - but circumstances changed. Perhaps journalists are hanging around in bars and listening to SpAds boast about what the boss has just said. Perhaps they're just making shit up.

It would be fascinating to see if any political journalist has a better than 50% ratio of hits to misses. I strongly suspect that they have an incentive to post the most outrageous rumour rather than the most accurate one.

So, if you have access to a couple of years of newspaper archives, a local AI model which won't burn the planet, and want to cause chaos - please create a leaderboard of the most- and least-accurate political rumour-mongers in the UK.

Although the above image show a very silly use of XSS, it could quite easily be used to craft a page to encourage journalists and readers to enter their passwords - and then send them off to criminals.

What's unusual is that it appears to be powered by Google Custom Search - which should really be robust against this source of attack.

I strongly encourage people to read and understand the OWASP Guide to XSS - and their other fine guides.

It will save a lot of heartache later on.

Timeline

• 20th February 2014 - Disclosed via their "technical problems with the website" form.
• 21st February 2014 - No response, so escalated to the Executive Editor.
• 26th February 2014 - Confirmed fixed.

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.

Alexi Mostrous

@AlexiMostrous

Looks like that stupid Fukishima radiation picture was a stupid fake

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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.