Kotaku ran a story on May 1st, by Luke Plunkett  entitled ”Sony Admits 10 Million Credit Card Account May Have Been Compromised” in which he stated his opinion as fact, and showed a lack of research and professionalism.

  • 1. He stated that Sony told all PSN users to change their credit cards due to the breach, then he linked to an article, written by him with no actual quotes from Sony, but a story about how much money it would cost banks to change 77 million credit card numbers.

Underlined, is what he said before he changed his article (taken from a cache on another site).

The article he wrote himself and quoted :    (Link)

This was not only  untrue, but had been re-iterated by Sony over and over again that you should be vigilant with your credit cards but that there was no evidence that the numbers were taken and that they were all encrypted. Two facts that were not included in the story. They never told anyone to cancel their credit card numbers, and his lack of a credible source showed he did not do his research. After this he changed his first sentence to “It’s a good thing Sony warned people to be vigilant with their credit cards,…” He then linked it to another article written by Brian Crecente (here) .

Plunkett's change of phrase.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • 2. He said that the fact that 10 million credit cards have been stolen was not yet “confirmed” by Sony (with confirmed in quotation marks), He also said that due to people commenting on Kotaku over the week, that this must be true, he later removed this from the article, but a reply to it did show up in one of the first comments to the story. Despite this commentor’s opinions of the author’s bias (which are not sourced of course) it shows evidence that Plunkett stated that the credit cards were all taken, and that he said it has yet to be “confirmed” which is now missing from the original article.

This shows that Plunkett did say all credit cards were stolen, and the word confirmed was used, that was later edited out

His now edited article states that this is now only a potential risk that these CC numbers were taken, changing what he originally posted without a retraction. “It’s important to note that these cards are still potentially at risk: there is still no confirmation that any of these ten million cards’ data have been compromised.” (Plunkett, in sources).

What does all this information mean?

This means that Luke Plunkett and by association Kotaku wrote a story that was fraudulent, without the proper research, and considering this article was written a full 24 hours after the original meeting he mis-quotes in the article, fashioned it to be the most sensational to get more traffic. Then it was edited to remove these inconsistencies without updating the readers. When I challenged Mr. Plunkett on this fact in the comments my Kotaku Star commenter status was stripped, and the post being critical of him was removed.

Kotaku wrote a fraudulent story, and then silenced any criticism. Kotaku credits themselves for being the internet’s most famous games journalists, but this event shows they do not have any journalistic ethics.

Here are a few things that Kotaku should do to improve their credentials.

  • Source all your quotes
  • Keep original versions of these posts for records, and when edited, tell reader why they were changed, and
  • post official retractions when incorrect stories are written and corrected.

Why is Journalistic integrity important?

This is important, especially in this case because the lack of journalistic standards led to people getting the wrong information, and potentially making decisions based on that incorrect information. Especially when dealing with people’s finances it is vital to receive correct and up to date information, things that this writer did not provide until challenged. This is in no way an exoneration of Sony’s security, which has been undoubtedly found wanting, but the fact that we should be able to trust those who call themselves journalists, and report the news.

 

PSoneClassics.com

 

Sources

Cached Article header - http://digibutter.nerr.biz

Now Plunkett’s edited article Kotaku – Link

All other pictures from Comments from the edited article.

All sources are protected under the DMCA as fair use, and as this is a journalistic post, and this is news.

 

*Edited to protect identity of commenter.

*Edited for typos, Thank you to all the people who pointed them out! Sometimes they’re hard to catch! (changed It’s to ITS, and He’s to His, I need to get a grammar check for posts it seems). (16/05/2011)

* A reply to the Reddit community, and a thank you. Here

*Edited again for typos, it seems I made a lot of them, and I don’t have a grammar check for sure, I realize it makes me look unprofessional I’ll try to do better. (17/05/2011)