NY Times: Apple Denies ‘Citizen Journalist Report’. Apple’s stock took a brief roller coaster ride this morning after a CNN “citizen journalist” wrote that an “insider” reported that Steve Jobs had been rushed to the hospital with chest pains.

Aha! Those infernal citizen journalists are ruining the world!

Calm down. CNN got used. Maybe it was an innocent mistake. Quite possibly, however, this was the work of someone whose intention was to briefly torpedo the Apple share price. If so, there’s a high probability that this person will be caught and, one hopes, punished.

But it isn’t the first time something like this has happened. False reports have been posted to public-relations wires, including the famous Emulex case many years ago when a fraudster — who was caught and punished — pulled just this kind of stunt.

I don’t know too many details about CNN’s iReport internal systems, but I do know that CNN has been running this kind of risk for some time. The labeling of the site has never been, in my view, sufficiently careful to shout at readers that they should not take for granted that anything they see is necessarily true — or that readers who might make any kind of personal or financial decision based on what they see on the site are idiots.

This is precisely the same warning that should (but doesn’t) come with comment boards on major newspaper websites. But you have to believe that no one with a shred of common sense takes the random ranting below, say, a Washington Post article as anything terribly serious.

The “story” quickly moved to financial and tech blogs and traditional media, which probably compounded the damage by giving the report more play. I was on a plane while all this was happening, so all I’m seeing is updated coverage.

The shareholders who panicked are fools. Not the first time. Maybe when enough people get burned after believing things they should ignore, we’ll all recognize that we have to be skeptical of everything — but not equally skeptical of everything.

Media literacy is scarily far behind the curve in a digital-media-saturated world.

UPDATE: A Wired piece entitled “‘Citizen Journalist’ Could Face Prison for Fake Jobs Story” begins:

The gutsy (and stupid) “citizen journalist” who posted an erroneous story that said CEO Steve Jobs had a heart attack has the hallmarks of a short seller, and it’s likely that he (or she) could face criminal charges and possibly prison time, according to one attorney.

Did an editor even glance at this before putting it online?

If the person who posted the false story about Steve Jobs was a short seller aiming to make money by planting a false rumor, then he was anything but a citizen journalist. He was a crook. Period.

Come on, Wired, you can do better than that.

Skype and its corporate parent, eBay, have been evasive about whether the product is truly secure. There’s ample reason — including this admission attributed to an Austrian law-enforcement agency — to suspect that the company has created backdoors for police.

Skype, for its part, has never outright denied that it has done so. Nor has it shown its encryption algorithms in an open way to outside experts for verification and analysis. I take this as an admission that you can’t trust Skype’s encryption, period.

This is important to citizen-media people for several reasons. First, plenty of regimes make it downright dangerous to indulge in truly free speech. Skype has been a favored tool for many people who believed the built-in encryption somehow would protect them.

Second, it’s another example of the way companies from the West collaborate with the globe’s most dictatorial regimes — and it makes abundantly clear that we need an open-source communications toolset that we can trust.

Skype is better than no encryption at all. But do not imagine for a minute that you can fully trust this company, because you can’t.

Citizen Media Law Project: Judge in Wikileaks Case Reverses Course, Wikileaks.org is Back Online.

Christopher Hitchens: Who needs a state censor when the press bites its own tongue so effectively? Do you ever wonder what is the greatest enemy of the free press? One might mention a few conspicuous foes, such as the state censor, the monopolistic proprietor, the advertiser who wants either favorable coverage or at least an absence of unfavorable coverage, and so forth. But the most insidious enemy is the cowardly journalist and editor who doesn’t need to be told what to do, because he or she has already internalized the need to please—or at least not to offend—the worst tyranny of all, which is the safety-first version of public opinion.

BBC: Afghan senate backs death penalty. Afghanistan’s upper house of parliament has issued a statement backing a death sentence for a journalist for blasphemy in northern Afghanistan. Pervez Kambakhsh, 23, was convicted last week of downloading and distributing an article insulting Islam. He has denied the charge. The UN has criticised the sentence and said the journalist did not have legal representation during the case.

This case shocks the conscience. Journalists — all of us — should be trying hard to stop this outrage.

If Afghanistan kills this man it will lose support from people who care about liberty, and at a time when it most needs that support. Surely Americans will ask themselves why our soldiers are dying to preserve such a loathsome regime. I know I will.

People like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant are some of the most pernicious commentators around. But equally pernicious, at least, are those who advocate laws that would proscribe and punish political expression, and those who exploit those laws to try use the power of the State to impose penalties on those expressing “offensive” or “insulting” or “wrong” political ideas. The mere existence of the “investigation,” interrogation, and proceeding itself is a grotesque affront to every basic liberty.

How many times can we say this? If you care about your own free speech rights, you must defend the rights of people whose speech makes your blood boil.

A herd of journalism-school deans wrote a predictable but also naive and possibly dangerous — and certainly not strategically forward-thinking — attack on media cross-ownership and the FCC’s loosening of its rules in today’s Times op-ed page.

They do mean well, and they are not off base on the idea that broadcasting’s former public service component has been tossed overboard in recent times.

Of course, the public service mission they wish for was never all that real in the first place. Perversely, the deans appear to be aiming to “save” local news coverage at organizations whose primary contributions to local journalism — in an era when network affiliates had to be run poorly to make less than 50 percent profit margins — is best summed up in the famous aphorism, “If it bleeds it leads.” Where were they when local new disintegrated into pap in the first place?

Even with that, their op-ed is misguided, as Jeff notes. And their brief dismissal of the Internet is just bizarre.

The rise of digital media means, barring a policy disaster, that we will clearly have enough outlets. The big issues are a) how to create new revenue models to support journalism in this medium, which has no scarcity the way old-time broadcasting did; and b) how to prevent new oligopolists from taking over.

We in the journalism education field need to focus on those topics, not whether future governments will force broadcasters to meet licensing terms written for an era of airwave scarcity.

I’m pleased to see that my new boss at Arizona State University is not on the list of deans who signed this piece.

Anonymous speech should generally be taken less seriously than speech where the speaker stands behind his own words, and I think this is such a case. But anonymous speech is part of a long and vital tradition in America, and this is also such an example.

Someone should show these officials the Bill of Rights. Kudos to the EFF for pursuing this case.

Rebecca MacKinnon: Is Web2.0 a wash for free speech in China? Lately I’ve given a few talks around town titled “Will the Chinese Communist Party Survive the Internet?” My answer – for the short and medium term at least – is “yes.”

Western media pundits and many policymakers have a tendency to assume that the Internet will ultimately bring democracy to China. As for the long run, I think China will change. But I doubt China’s political evolution will follow the same pattern as the West. I am not convinced that, if China eventually becomes more pluralistic, it will necessarily involve the same political structures as Western democracies. Lately I’ve been wondering whether the Internet and mobile technologies could be major contributing factors to why China will evolve differently.