My friends at The Churner Prize website, dedicated to exposing examples of the abject laziness of modern journalism, appear to be taking a break at the moment, otherwise the tale of the five-year-old who used his grandfather’s eBay account to bid £197,654 for a Nintendo Wii console would surely have been exposed as blatant tosh.
What’s the one thing you know about eBay? Yes, that it’s an auction site, meaning that punters bid against each other with the highest bid winning. So for this child to bid £197,654 must have meant that someone else had bid £197,653, and we all know that that never happened.
Sadly, it’s two formerly respectable newspapers which regurgitated without question this utter toss. Step forward the Northern Echo, followed the next day by the Daily Telegraph.
Of course, back in pre-history many newspapers had people called ‘sub-editors’, whose job it was to ask difficult questions about silly stories like this …
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