“I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.” — Aneurin Bevan
I admit it: I’m a news junkie. Every day I catch up on what’s happening around the world and in the field of eLearning thanks to various news outlets that scour the globe to find out the latest goings on. Sure, sometimes the mainstream media doesn’t cover something important, and independent media have to pick up the slack, but that’s just how it is. No industry is perfect, after all, and for the most part the news media does a lot more good than harm.
Right, for the most part. But these are tough times for news media. The Internet has not been kind to newspapers in particular, or even television news. At the same time, it’s not like Internet-only news sources tend to have a large number of actual journalists writing stories. As a result, many news outlets have cut back on their reporting staff levels, filling pages with stories that were obtained as cheaply as possible from third parties rather than going out to find out firsthand what’s really happening.
Unfortunately, this can be dangerous. Recently I saw a supposed news story on Yahoo! News that is so irresponsible that it makes me pretty angry. It’s a press release from a notorious diploma mill called MUST University that has scammed many people. No journalist sat down and wrote this article, or even checked it out before it went up on Yahoo! News. It was simply written by the scammers themselves, submitted to a company that they paid to promote it as a real press release, and then picked up and published online without any review for accuracy.
When you’re a prospective student looking for the right school through which you can earn a degree by eLearning, it’s hard enough even choosing a college or university from all the real choices out there. But when this sort of deliberate misinformation is added into the mix, things are downright dangerous! But there are a few things one can do to minimize the risk of being taken in by this sort of scam. First, remember that just because it looks like news doesn’t mean you can trust it. Second, if a school wants you to make a one time payment in exchange for a degree, with nothing more required, that’s not a “life experience degree”, that’s just a fake.