Rieder: In which the news media go to the dogs

You hardly expect North Korea to emerge as one of the world's news capitals.

One of the planet's most isolated nations, the repressive dictatorship is hardly overrun with free-roaming journalists.

But lately, it seems that the news is all North Korea, all the time.

Most recently, of course, the focus is on the basketball diplomacy of noted statesman Dennis Rodman and the quirky former basketball player's bromance with North Korea leader Kim Jong Un. The onetime NBA rebounding machine seems blissfully untroubled by Un's dreadful human rights record. The only good aspect of Rodman's silly foray is that his merry band of troubadours includes former NBA player Sleepy Floyd. You just can't have too many Sleepy Floyd references.

But before Rodman once again unleashed his inner Henry Kissinger, the big news out of Pyongyang was that the boy dictator last month executed, among others, his uncle and one-time mentor Jang Song Thaek,

The story received a new round of attention last week, but with a dramatic and horrific twist: There were reports that Thaek and five others had been mauled to death by a large pack of dogs who had been starved for five days for the occasion.

To be sure, many outlets in the United States and Great Britain spread this news with the qualifier that the horrendous act had been "reported" or claimed." Often, accounts cited The Straits Times in Singapore as the source,

But too often, the stories were trumpeted in the stentorian tones of serious news, not as wild, "Do you believe this?" rumor.

Witness New York's Daily News last Friday:

"Kim Jong Un literally threw his uncle to the dogs.

"The North Korean leader executed his high-ranking uncle by having him stripped, thrown into a cage and eaten alive by 120 starving hounds as the despot himself looked on, the Singoporean Straits Times reports, citing an article in a Hong Kong paper with close ties to China's ruling Communist Party."

Or check out NBC News:

"North Korean! leader Kim Jong Un's powerful uncle was stripped naked, thrown into a cage, and eaten alive by a pack of ravenous dogs, according to a newspaper with close ties to China's ruling Communist Party."

(USA TODAY wasn't immune to the story's obvious charms. We ran a piece from our content partner Newser with the headline "Report: Kim Jong Un fed uncle alive to 120 starved dogs" that hedged, "If an unconfirmed newspaper report is to be believed.")

So what's the deal? Is this outlandish tale bogus or the real thing?

A Chicago-based blogger decided to find out.

On Saturday, software engineer Trevor Powell reported on his Pacific SIde blog that the original source of the death-by-dog story was a post by a Chinese satirist on a microblogging website called Tencent Weibo on Dec. 11. Here's how the story evolved after that:

The following day, the account was picked up by the Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po, which cited Tencent Weibo as its source.and posted a screen capture of the post.

But the story didn't pick up steam until 12 days later, when the Straits Times ran with it, citing Wen Wei Po, which it described as the Chinese government's "official mouthpiece." It also helpfully included what it called the official term for execution by dog -- "quan jue," in case you didn't know.

Soon after, all manner of Western publications were spotlighting this nonsense.

The saga is a classic case of the risks of journalism in the digital age. It's very common today for news outlets to run stories based on the work of others. For that matter, many aggregators exist entirely or largely thanks to the work of others. But you've got to be very careful about what you choose to use. (Witness BuzzFeed, et al., and the story about the nasty airline encounter that never was.)

What complicated things in this case was as the story moved through the food chain, it moved upward, acquiring more credibility as it went along.

I tried to contact Powell, who says on his Twitter fee! d that he! works "at the intersection of technology, history, geography and archaeology," in an effort to secure his account of the detective work that led to the evisceration of yet another too-good-to-check story. But he didn't respond.

In a follow-up post on his site, he wrote, "To be fair, Wen Wei Po cited their source, and The Straits Times cited their source, and so on and so forth, What you have is a chain of sources of increasing credibility, each quoting from a source that may be slightly less dependable."

He also pointed out that "The Straits Times article built on the Wen Wei Po piece by giving it a more official tone and failing to mention the social-media source. From there, it exploded around the world, and none of the slew of articles that discussed the Wen Wei Po source mentioned the original source Wen Wei Po had cited."

Of the other hand, even if the U.S. outlets mentioned the story originated with Tencent Weibo, how much would that have helped?

The truly tragic aspect of all this: It won't be so easy to laugh smugly next time the Chinese media pick up an Onion story like the one that said Kim Jong Un was the sexiest man alive.