Disinformation Disservice: Hoax's Harming Reality

I saw this at Tim Blair. I guess Instapundit also has discussed this.

It rocketed across the Internet a week ago, a startling newspaper report that agents from the US Department of Homeland Security had visited a student at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth at his New Bedford home simply because he had tried to borrow Mao Tse-Tung's ''Little Red Book" for a history seminar on totalitarian goverments.

The story, first reported in last Saturday's New Bedford Standard-Times, was picked up by other news organizations, prompted diatribes on left-wing and right-wing blogs, and even turned up in an op-ed piece written by Senator Edward M. Kennedy in the Globe.

But yesterday, the student confessed that he had made it up after being confronted by the professor who had repeated the story to a Standard-Times reporter.

Now I fully understand the pundits making comments on this, and hopefully making corrections (though I wouldn't hold my breath on that). The worst of all is Teddy-The-Tick's comments being defended instead of retracted.

''Incredibly, we are now in an era where reading a controversial book may be evidence of a link to terrorist," he wrote in an op-ed piece in Thursday's Globe.

Laura Capps, a Kennedy spokeswoman, said last night that the senator cited ''public reports" in his opinion piece. Even if the assertion was a hoax, she said, it did not detract from Kennedy's broader point that the Bush administration has gone too far in engaging in surveillance.

There's that "fake-but-true" thing rearing it's ugly head again. And being supported by one of the Democrat's elder crackpots.

The disservice of such rumors going to major news is astounding. This is another one of those "news" reports that will be sited as truth even though they are completely debunked. This type of actions will also cause resistance to believing real questionable or illegal activities when they come.

Also notice that the student hasn't been named. So much holding hoaxters to be responsible for their actions.