Microwave mentality part two: All the news fit to gank

In Microwave mentality part one, Kidsleepy paints the picture of a world too busy to concentrate on one thing at a time, asking smart machines to do all the thinking for us, leaving us to get ever dumber. This isn't limited to the consumer, this is also highly visible in the world of the creators.
We've even made it a new form of advertising, the world of "viral" and hoaxes, using the new medias inability to check a story to plant things such as the Alpha1 fake wrapping of the statue of liberty, the Danish single mother seeking the baby daddy and the bullet proof baby pram hoax. Even things so clearly impossible such as the Ford Mustang "resin" billboards spread far and wide as nobody thought to think about it for second. The one to publish first wins all the links in the link economy. Let me know when I can feed my kid with links.
In a world where we are constantly connected all the time, we spread news like a game of telephone, 140 chars and shortened URL's at a time. The original message is garbled along the way, or worse never checked in the first place. Anatomy of a hoax shows how one man snowballed 1,000 news articles on the “Sony Nexus X” by building a few fake images and posting them to Picasa.
Yes, that was it. He posted them to Picasa. Nothing more. Nobody asked him any questions, not even if they had permissions to repost his copyrighted images, because fuck that, right? Regardless of how you feel about copyrights, back when one still bothered to ask permission, one would also check the story.

One slightly off-putting thing about this entire episode was that not a single soul made any attempts to contact the owner of the Picasa album. Seriously. Not one comment reaching out to the elusive Mutul Yeter (whose name I actually misspelled). Man, if I was a journalist, the very first thing I would do is to make some sort of attempt to contact the person who posted the leak. Even if it was a long shot, I could be the guy who put the whole thing to bed. That has to count for something.

Huffington posts of the world, that gank images, news and embed youtube's without question, they don't even ask the image rights owner what is up. Verify a story? Why even the grey lady raised a Jayson Blair.

with lots of incorrect information, notably about the recent Fairey judgement in the opening paragraph. Cliff notes on that case here. Clearly this case is not "serving as a clear reminder to all of the importance of fair compensation for those who gather and produce original news content" as the AP CEO had hoped.
* The book The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption