Being Careful with Sources

In a digital age, it's easier than ever for someone to pretend to be something that he or she is not. This can be a serious issue for a journalist. (In fact, I've got an article coming up in the October issue of The Writer on how to help detect such problems before they happen.) I came across an example of someone pretending on the social networking site Twitter to be from ExxonMobile. A market analyst from Forrester wrote about the "person," assuming that her defense of such things as the Exxon Valdez was real. He never checked out the person, and so looked like a fool in print. It's a danger to take people at electronic face value. Before using comments that someone makes, be sure you know who exactly is making them.