plain as the lies on your face.

I finally got around to reading the article posted about lurking...

Do people actually do this?! I'm appalled, but not surprised. I guess that I never really thought about it much. It's the fact that there are so many lies involved that has me strapped. We're not even supposed to trust Internet sources to use in research papers much anymore, and somehow (I'm fascinated how) journalists think that visiting chatrooms, message boards, and private sites is a viable way of gathering facts.

How is that viable? People on message boards and chats don't have to be experts in the area discussed in order to be members. It's more than likely that all they really had to do was supply a name and email address to be signed up for an account, so how is it that the "general public" (using the term loosely) is a wonderful source of information, all of a sudden?

And that's not even the beginning of the spindles of lies that could be held within this kind of reporting!

I mean, the reporters have to lie to stay hidden (or "masked") and the people on the sites replying to the reporters could be lying, as I stated above. The example given in the article about the reporter Egan doing the study on gay teens was really risky. (Lucky for the newspaper, they had a female on this topic and not a male, because I can guess what would happen if someone got ahold of a story of a reporter calling up gay teens that he met on a website to meet for an "interview." Yah, that'd go over about as well as a lead balloon, if you know what I mean...) Honestly, (ha! I make joke, no?) she could have gone wrong so many times in compiling her interviews and reports that I can't even count them! (Personally, I'd like to know what idiot kids agreed to meet with a person they met online, because it's only all over the news that people are abducted, tortured, raped, or murdered resulting from meetings with people they met on the Internet. How stupid!)

Should journalists lurk? In my humble opinion, absolutely not. Given: nothing (and I mean nothing!) on the Internet is truly private, it shouldn't matter. Saying it's okay for journalists to lurk just gives serial killers and other sick-minded members of the human race a cover for their next scheme to round up some innocents for their pleasure.

Not to mention that giving journalists the right to lurk, even if it wouldn't involve false identities and all that jazz, would really begin to demoralize the quality of the news. You're telling me that I can't use Internet sources in my research for school, but it's okay for professionals to quote something I may have posted in a message board online. Riiiggghht... that makes a whole lot of sense...