Media Duped

This week was my turn to present to the class on the rule of the search engine for modern journalists.

I spoke of an incident that occured recently where internet marketer Lyndon Antcliff created a false story about a 13 year old boy from Texas who had allegedly gone on a $30,000 shopping spree with his father's credit card. And what did he buy? Hookers. The story was completely false, but thanks to Antcliff's skills in getting the story rated highly in web searches, it was picked up by media outlets around the world and is believed to have gained about 6000 links across the web.

The saga was labeled 'link bait' and demonstrates just how easy it is to get particular sites ranked highly in web searches and emphasises the need for journalists to be constantly critically assertive when using search engines in their news writing process.

Here is a segment aired on Media Watch about the link bait incident.

http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/watch/default.htm?program=mediawatch&pres=20080526_2120&story=1