Some good advice from a friend and former co-worker: Wondering whether that shocking, possibly fake-looking news story is for real or not before you post it to all your friends? A friend was asking, and I thought this would be of general help to everyone: The Onion is a well-known satire site, but there are plenty of others. Its easy to check those news sites to see if they are for real or not. 1) Look for an About Us link at the top or bottom of the page, or scroll to the bottom of the article itself and look for some text like what is at the bottom of one I read recently: The stories posted on TheNewsNerd are for entertainment purposes only. The stories may mimic articles found in the headlines, but rest assured they are purely satirical. 2) Failing that, search on Google News (news.google) for some significant combination of keywords (e.g., Chicago military deployed) and if you dont see anything about it there, then its probably not for real. Yes there have been a lot of shooting deaths in Chicago lately, but no, it has not been declared a war zone, and no, the military has not been deployed there. Dont get people alarmed if there is no reason to. Smile and enjoy the satire, pass it on if you like, but do it with a caveat since there are a lot of gullible people out there. But now you know how not to be one of them. ;-)
Posted on: Sat, 12 Jul 2014 05:04:29 +0000
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