Everyone get's duped by "fake" news story

The last two days I've been reading this story Walmart to cover up "M" rated games. The reason I've been reading about it for two days is because the story seems to have popped up on almost every gaming site on the web. Here's the link to the original story:

http://scrapetv.com/Games/Games%20Pages/News/
walmart%20to%20cover%20up.html

When I first read the story I was pissed and amused. After looking a little deeper though, I realized the story wasn't true. It's pretty obvious the site it came from was satirical in nature. But the story kept popping up everywhere, particularly on digg. Legit sites were picking it up, including Game Daily:

http://news.filefront.com/wal-mart-covering-up-m-rated-games/

Strange. It makes me wonder about the state of web journalism and the need for both websites and readers to look at things a little more critically. I emailed Scrape TV and they don't seem to know what happened. Their response: "It looks like someone found the story and posted it on N4G. It does seem to have gotten out of hand."

Agreed.

With, currently, 1250+ diggs from a high end site like Game Daily, it certainly seems to have gotten out of hand. Frankly I find the whole thing funny, but it does shake my confidence, just a little bit, in the state of internet journalism.

Of course, I'm not going to stop reading.