Gizmodo Floats
CBS News published and then retracted a quote that Steve Jobs is dead.
Steve Jobs is not dead.
If you enter Steve Jobs is Dead into your favorite search engine, you'll get 1.02 swillion skillion results.
The echosphere is, by its very nature, stupid. Everybody wants some page views. About 99.99% of them don't matter. Of the remaining 0.0001, 0.9999 of those that matter are wrong. Which leaves us to sift through literally millions of sites that are completely full of half-digested corn and peanuts to get to the occasional nugget of something useful.
Luckily, a few places on the internet have established a reputations; we can rely on the quality of their reporting to meet a standard. Two of these sites are CBS and Gizmodo.
You may be absolutely certain that if CBS publishes something really sensational, eventually they'll get around to checking their facts. In this case a CBS employee or affiliate or whatever sent a tweet that Steve Jobs was dead. After it sat on the internet for a full minute, it was retracted.
Once something is on the internet it becomes the permanent record. Tweeted is forever if the tweeter has any following.
When you're a company who wants to be viewed as a paragon of journalistic integrity – a company with a legacy that goes back to the earliest days of radio – you can't let garbage like that slip through the cracks. You. Can. Not. Period.
As for Gizmodo, well, they have a pretty much open thread on their post about Steve Jobs is (Not) Dead. Go find it if you're interested. I'll be damned if I'll link it. Gizmodo jumped right to the front of the line to make sure that if Steve Jobs was really dead, they'd get the scoop.
Now, if you want to, you can go see Gizmodo's incredibly tasteless comment thread, upon which paid advertising graces each column inch.
So it's good to know that Gizmodo has not yet established rock bottom for ethics and morals. Buying a stolen iPhone prototype and reporting on it with photos showed them to be ethically challenged, if not utterly amoral.
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