Sources, Stories and Motives: When will websites learn?

I am constantly amazed that in an era when we are supposedly more aware and more discerning about many things, including where we get our news, that a website would take an obviously suspect report and back it up.

News On News basically highlighted Claire Atkinson's reporting at the New York Post on the exodus of talent at CNBC.

Now if that sentence isn't already setting off alarm bells, then it should be.

It's not that the story hasn't got a lot of facts in it. It does. Guy Johnson and Trish Regan have joined Bloomberg, Erin Burnett joined CNN, and Melissa Francis joined Fox Business.

What has got me going is the speculation about CNBC's David Faber being the next one to depart, which is based on absolutely nothing.

If you think about it for a moment, the motive for the story is clear. The New York Post is owned by NewsCorp, the troubled company at the centre of the News Of The World phone hacking scandal.

NewsCorp also owns the Fox Business Channel, who is a direct competitor of... CNBC.

This is the same basic trick that NewsCorp worked so well while they establishing Fox News Channel. Talk down your opposition and slowly build yourselves up.

People are wiser to this trick now. But why News On News didn't spot that obvious conflict of interest, I'm not sure.

Dubious Awards for Dubious News!

I have some awards to hand out to "newsmakers" and organisations, who have the dubious distinction of creating some very dubious news stories.

The Backpedalling Bicycle Award goes to Idaho Senator Larry Craig (Republican) for stating that if he can get the disorderly conduct case overturned in court in Minneapolis, he will NOT resign his Senate seat. Of course, once you've pled guilty, getting that plea overturned is very, very difficult indeed.

The Award for the Most Desperate Attempt at Momentum Scuttling is shared between Newsbusters, the blog of the Media Research Center, and The Mark Levin Show for the desperate attempt at stopping MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann's current momentum, which resulted in a week of great numbers, including the most total viewers who have ever watched the show, and the first victory ever for Countdown against The O'Reilly Factor in the key 25-54 advertising demographic.

Newsbusters uses the Mark Levin Show site as proof that Keith Olbermann, or as Mark Levin seems to like to call him, Keith Overbite, is a mysoginist. The trouble is that the links on the page, the links that Newsbusters seem to highlight as being proof of his mysoginy, are in fact on the New York Post website, which is owned by the same person who owns Fox News. Yes, you've guessed it, your friend and mine, Rupert Murdoch. And guess what, the stories highlight what is said against him, and are treated as fact, when in actuality, all we really have in those articles, is one person's side of the story. No hard and fast facts here for the Truthseeker to find.

So, possible lies, and nothing offered in the way of proof. Can we believe the stories to be undeniable fact? No, plainly we cannot, because of the lack of proof, and because the New York Post, much like it's broadcast cousin Fox News, has a definite agenda against Keith. It was the New York Post, if you recall, that trivialised the story about the white powder that was sent to Keith Olbermann's home. Keith later set the record straight on his own newscast.

So, why did Newsbusters highlight this? Simple, to try and slow down the momentum that has built up since NBC aired a live edition of Countdown with Keith Olbermann on a Sunday Night not too long ago. Nothing more than that.

Congratulations to our rather dubious award winners!