It happens to the best of us.
On April 1, broadwayworld.com, a leading entertainment industry website, published a 947-word story about Clint Eastwood directing a movie about the life of the late Stompin Tom Connors.
Australian actor Bryan Brown was to star as Stompin and Shania Twain as Lena Welsh, the singer-songwriter's wife.
The article included quotes from Eastwood, Bryan, Shania and even Stompin's son, Tom Jr. It had details on the filming schedule-set for this summer in Saint John, NB and Skinners Pond, PEI-and the release date, just in time for Canada Day, 2014.
It even went as far as providing biographical sketches of all the main players, as any credible piece would.
April fools!
Unfortunately, before the hoax was revealed, some pretty prestigious Canadian media outlets, including the Globe and Mail, picked up the story and ran with it.
In terms of mistakes, this one is fairly benign. Wipe egg off face. Run correction and apologize. No harm done.
It does underscore, however, the general malaise in our business of shrinking newsroom budgets and the instant news cycle brought on by social media and so-called "citizen journalism."
My first real gig in journalism was as a fact-checker for a magazine in Ottawa. Yes, it is true, magazines and newspapers used to employ people whose job it was to go through stories and check the veracity of everything that could potentially bite the publisher in the butt.
One of my best catches was in a story about Liban Hussein, an Ottawa businessman, who, in 2001, was arrested by Ottawa police at the request of the United States for suspicion of having links to terrorism.
Hussein ran a money transfer business Barakaat North America Inc. for Somali nationals in North America to send money to family in their home country.
The article claimed that Hussein and his business was on the U.S. Treasury Department's list terrorist suspects. The author cited the Globe and Mail as the source of the information, which was true. As it turned out the Globe had gotten the information from the Boston Globe, another well-respected news organization. Many others had picked it up as well.
But, as any good fact-checker knows, newspapers and other media are secondary sources. I decided to go directly to the Treasury Department. Liban Hussein and his business were not on the list. He never was.
Nevertheless, his assets were frozen, his businesses-he also owned a cleaning company-were destroyed despite the fact neither U.S. nor Canadian authorities ever produced a shred of evidence against him.
Unfortunately, the newsroom fact-checker, once a proud and noble profession, is, if not extinct, definitely on the endangered list leaving it up to reporters and editors to be our own fact-checkers.
It is kind of scary at times. Consider the case of Jayson Blair. Blair was a reporter for the New York Times. In 2003, Times editor Jim Roberts got a call from the San Antonio Express-News inquiring about the close similarities between a story ostensibly written by Blair and one written by one of the Texas paper's reporters.
The resulting investigation revealed Blair was not only a plagiarist, but had been outright fabricating elements of some of his stories including quotations.
Ironically, the demise of fact-checking in mainstream media combined with the explosion of all things Internet, has resulted in an entire cottage industry of websites that do nothing but fact-check.
Unfortunately, sorting through whether or not these sites are legitimate-some are actually run by political parties- presents a whole other level of fact-checking challenges.
Canada's Sun "News" Network, for example, typically uses the term fact-checking for its practice of fact fabrication.
Facts, it seems, have become a matter of opinion.
And, of course, many people on both sides of the political spectrum are not interested in the facts as much as having their ideological views validated.
The crux of the matter is, we are all capable of bias, we are all vulnerable to mistakes and some of us have no compunction in telling outright lies.
"Don't believe everything you read," the old saying goes. No matter how reliable or reputable the source, it is still still advisable to treat every story with a healthy dose of skepticism.
