The Washington Post Journalist banned for Twitter lie

The next time you plan to keep your followers updated on Twitter, hold your horses. For that ‘tweet nothing’ can land you in trouble, as a senior sports journalist working with The Washington Post discovered much to his disdain.

The veteran columnist, Mike Wise, was suspended for a month by the newspaper on Tuesday, a day after he posted a fake report on his Twitter account.

“ Roethlisberger will get five games, I’m told,” Wise wrote under his Twitter handle, @ MikeWiseguy, on Monday, in a reference to the suspension handed down to Pittsburgh Steelers player Ben Roethlisberger.

According to Wise, he wanted to prove a point about how journalists these days run stories without independently verifying the information. So he tweeted that Roethlisberger, who has been accused of sexually assaulting a Georgia college student, would get a five- game suspension.

Wise later admitted that the move was a “ horrendous mistake”. “ I’m not a journalism ombudsman,” Wise told the media. “ And I found that out in a very painful, hard way. I need to take my medicine and move on, and promise everybody this will never happen again. I’m paying the price I should for careless, dumb behaviour,” he added.

He said his bosses at the newspaper felt that he needed a month to think about the severity of his actions. “I tried to showcase the absurdity of bad journalism. I could give you 10 reasons why I did this and what went wrong in the execution. I made a horrendous mistake, using my Twitter account that identifies me as a Washington Post columnist,” he explained.