The intriguing lede to Mitch Potter's story in the Toronto Star: "You attend a press conference. The newsmaker speaks. You run a DNA test to confirm they are who they claim to be. And then you publish."
An absurd notion. But only marginally more absurd than the high comedy that played out at Washington's National Press Club on Monday, a few floors above the Toronto Star's Washington Bureau, when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce made big news that wasn't.
Already in the news for its hard-lobbying opposition to U.S. climate-change legislation, the pro-business Chamber dropped reporters' jaws with what appeared to be a turning-point announcement - that the organization now accepts that "without a stable climate, there will be no business."
The dramatic reversal was conveyed instantly, led by the Reuters agency, and minutes later it was picked up by the New York Times and Washington Post Web sites.
But by the time Fox Business News jumped in with real-time analysis, the real U.S. Chamber of Commerce burst into the news conference, together with red-faced representatives of the National Press Club, to debunk the proceedings as a hoax.
Reporters' heads swiveled back and forth from the possible interlopers at the podium to the possible interlopers who were calling them out, wondering who among them was legitimate. For a few minutes both sides stood their ground. Someone asked for a business card.
And finally the ruse was revealed - the man purportedly speaking on behalf of America's largest business lobby was in fact Andy Bichlbaum of the anti-corporate pranksters known as the Yes Men, who had just pulled off their piece de resistance. ...
The real Chamber is hopping mad, as you would expect, and the Press Club is cringingly embarrassed at how easily the acceptance of a $500 room rental fee exposed a major vulnerability to guerrilla-style activism. The rest of us received a cardinal lesson in the dangers of the tweet-first-ask-questions-later pace of modern news.
In this case, I think the Press Club erred by not checking the bona fides of the purported Chamber event.
As for the reporters, should they be faulted for trusting the Press Club that this was an actual U.S. Chamber of Commerce event? If you've gone to a thousand such events and never had a problem, should you be faulted for being off your guard this time?
A bigger question is this: If the "chamber" is reversing a long-held policy, do you hold back and ask a few questions, or do you widely distribute the news as soon as possible?
I don't know what I would have done had I been there, but one of my few cardinal rules as a journalist is this: Don't be played for a sucker.