Today we have a great example of the perils of a swirling rumor mill as we count down to Friday's trade deadline.
A report on Tuesday from a reliable source, WEEI in Boston, reported on its Twitter account that the Red Sox had acquired Indians ace Cliff Lee. The only problem? It was a fake Twitter account, and the report was a hoax.
The story was spread about the Web before Rob Bradford, the WEEI reporter who supposedly broke the story, wrote on his actual Twitter account that "I have not reported anything. Somebody is hacking into my account."
It turned out that it wasn't that his account was hacked, but that someone created a realistic counterfeit page complete with WEEI logos and everything.
There are a lot of good sources of information out there, and one of the best and fastest is Rotoworld. We do our best to be both quick and accurate here, and both myself and Aaron dabble in the now-is-not-soon-enough world of Twitter.
But today's incident is a reminder to us all to be careful, and maybe even slow down just a bit.
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"Quick and accurate" like when you reported that per Will Carroll, Johan Santana was going to the Red Sox a few years ago?
Yeah, you're so "reliable" that you can't even correctly report what the fake Twitter account was claiming in this story The report DID NOT state "that the Red Sox had acquired Indians ace Cliff Lee." It claimed they were "close to a trade."
And way to try and blame others for your irresponsible journalism. Humm, an official WEEI Twitter account with ZERO followers. Yeah, that sounds totally credible.