This is one of the reasons the ‘blogosphere’ has no credibility, and it has nothing to do with accepting money for advertising or content posts. It has nothing to do with money, and nothing to do with honesty. It’s about fact checking.

Earlier this month, major Bucharest daily Libertatea published a story saying two Romanians had named their baby Yahoo and printed a picture of his birth certificate. The news was widely picked up on the Internet.

“It was the reporter’s child’s birth certificate, which he modified,” said Simona Ionescu, Libertatea’s deputy editor-in-chief on Monday. “We fired him.”

Check your sources before reporting things as fact; read past the damn headline before writing up your blog post in broken english, loading it with calls to action and exclamation points. Stories about Yahoo buying SixApart come to mind… This is the sort of thing that the people calling for blog ethics committees and blogger’s right documents ignore — that people like to pass on gossip, and it’s rarely even run through the great Snopes Filter.

Reuters story