http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/29/cyberwar-spun-shoddy-journalism
By Heather Brooke
guardian.co.uk
29 March 2013
A veteran Reuters reporter related a piece of advice given by his editor: "It's
not just what you print that makes you an authoritative and trusted source for
news, but what you don't print."
He wasn't talking about censorship, he was talking about what separates
journalism from stenography and propaganda: sceptical scrutiny. The
professionalism of the craft isn't simply learning to write or broadcast what
other people tell you. Crucially it is the ability to delve, interrogate and
challenge, and checking out stories you've discovered through your own
curiosity, or robustly testing what other people tell you is true.
Scepticism was in short supply this week when breathless claims about the
collapse of the internet were published in such reputable publications as the
New York Times, the BBC and even technical journal Ars Technica, all falling
prey to the hyped-up drama of a DDoS attack against Spamhaus, a group that
tracks spammers, and their alleged attacker Cyberbunker, a Dutch hosting
company Spamhaus had blacklisted.
Ars Technica described the attack as at "a scale that's threatening to clog up
the internet's core infrastructure and make access to the rest of the internet
slow or impossible". "If a Tier 1 provider fails, that risks breaking the
entire internet," it continued.
[...]
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