Citizen journalists fake earthquake coverage

THE FRENCH NEWS AGENCY AFP is getting its knickers in a twist over Internet coverage of the Haiti quake.

Apparently some of the snaps that were posted on the world wide web were not real. Most were from last February's quake in China, the 2004 Japan tremor and even regular stock photo shots of Haiti.

AFP said that some of the high-resolution images published on Twitter were just ones that people had nicked off other parts of the web.

After all one ruined building is much the same as another and who is going to know?

The situation is being suggested as a reason to say that citizen hacks and the Internet cannot be really trusted over traditional news agency coverage.

However, as the online editor-in-chief of Fairfax Media, publisher of the Herald, Mike van Niekerk said, the huge online audience keeps mistakes and deliberate troublemakers in check.

Readers swiftly point out when he gets something wrong, he said, which is something AFP does not get.

Mind you if AFP wants rapid complaints from readers it can have some of ours. µ