Information Cascades and News Stories
When one watches the news on television, reads it online, or gets their information from any other source, it often seems that all media outlets are reporting on the same thing. This makes sense when it comes to important worldwide events. However, it seems that time and time again obviously fake or incorrect news stories enter the media and permeate through all mainstream channels. Many of these stories are so outlandish that one would think that of the hundreds of people who work at these media companies, at least one would figure out the truth before reporting on it. I believe that using the model of information cascades is a great way to examine the behavior of people who work at media companies and for explaining why false news stories can easily enter mainstream media.
One example is that in 2008 a story about a 13-year-old boy who used his dad’s credit card to buy video games and pay for prostitutes to play said videos games with him began making its rounds through media outlets.
The entire story was completely made up by an internet writer who was simply trying to drive traffic to his website. It seemed though that once a couple of media outlets reported the story, others jumped on the bandwagon, creating the information cascade. This may have even been the ration decision even if the story seemed outlandish. If it proved to be false, then they were only acting with the crowd, but if it were true and they didn’t report it, then they probably would have received flack for not reporting it.
http://www.cracked.com/article_17318_7-clearly-fake-news-stories-that-fooled-mainstream-media.html