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Washington Post Suspends Mike Wise for Roethlisberger Twitter 'Hoax'

by Caleb Johnson on August 31, 2010 at 04:45 PM

Washington Post columnist tweets fake news story.
By now, everybody knows that news is often broken on social networking sites like Twitter. But Mike Wise, a Washington Post columnist, tried to reinforce this point and teach careless journalists a lesson in an ethically irresponsible way: fabricating a story and posting it on his Twitter account. According to Fanhouse, Wise tweeted that Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger would be suspended by the NFL for five games this season. While it's true that Roethlisberger faces a suspension for an off-season incident, nobody knows yet just how long it will last. Since Wise is (supposedly) a respected journalist, other newspapers and websites reported this "breaking news" and attributed it to the source -- Wise. A few hours later, Wise confessed to the hoax, and called himself "an idiot" in a tweet. Judging by a post on The Washington Post's sports blog, Wise's peers in the media didn't think his prank was funny, and it appears that Wise has been suspended by The Washington Post for a month. (This also comes from Wise's radio show, so who knows if it's true.) Though Wise was right about his theory that journalists can be lazy in source-checking, his ill-conceived prank made not so much of a statement as it made a fool out of a once-respected journalist.

Tags: ben roethlisberger, BenRoethlisberger, Hoax, journalism, mikewise, pittsburgh steelers, PittsburghSteelers, sports, The Washington Post, TheWashingtonPost, top, twitter

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