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Comment by peeters | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this is incredible how many tech authors were victim to such an obvious oversight. It really shows how much of modern news reporting is just a giant game of Telephone, with very few people willing to actually go to the source independently.

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The best part is that if someone said Steve Ballmer wrote the BSOD message, people will believe him because he could cite 10 sources, not knowing that those sources all stemmed from the same incorrect source.

Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/978/ "Citogenesis"

Wikipedia touches briefly on this problem in "Reliability of Wikipedia": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Infor...

The most entertaining example is arguably the Coati, which due to a widely-picked-up piece of wikivandalism arguably now is "also known as the Brazilian Aardvark"... except, after editorial discussion, on Wikipedia where the name was coined https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Coati

News has always been this way really. In the past readers have lacked the ability to fact check quickly and easily or have the subjects publish corrections on their own with such ease as in this case.

How many readers of the actual article on Register, Engadget, BGR, DailyTech etc. are going to be reading this correction?

None, the same for traditional media for all of time. Media cares very little for actual truthful, accurate news, its more about viewers, readers, subscribers, listeners and $$. It's been like this forever though.

It seems to me like this wasn't so much an oversight, as it was gleeful embellishment of the facts. I can understand a couple of the situations being honest mistakes, but most of them are perfect examples of how entrenched click bait and the colour yellow is in tech "journalism".

The problem is there isn't much alternative.

I mean, we have two choices:

Blissfully oblivious mainstream coverage of tech that seems to be written by and for tech-illiterate octegenarians,

Borderline-sociopathic conroversy-driven click-bait tech industry insider journalism.

I don't know if it's that black and white, but that's certainly each end of the spectrum. I think the most important thing is to stay away from aggregators and blogs and focus on websites that are making good content that can stand on its own.

Ars Technica and Forbes Technology are two good examples of this that come to mind, and until recently I would have counted The Verge as well. The problem is that instead of supporting the types of sites we want to read, we are complaining about the ones we don't.

Unfortunately people are lazy.

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