Now, should you believe what you read on newspaper websites or hear on the radio?

Media Watch viewers know the answer is frequently 'no'. But according to an outfit called the Levitt Institute, too many people do.

It recently put out this report:

Deception Detection Across Australian Populations — Report, The Levitt Institute, 12th September, 2009

Read the full report published by The Levitt Institute

Last Sunday a media release about the research was picked up by Australian Associated Press.

Its story was widely run on news websites around the country:

Sydney the most naive city, study finds Pssst! Have you heard the one about Captain Cook and his three wives? — The Age online, 20th September, 2009

Read the full story published in The Age online

As the Levitt Institute's Lauren Kennedy told the ABC in Brisbane next morning...

Lauren Kennedy: We took around a thousand 25 to 35 year-olds from five different states and we got them to read 15 different articles that were based on Australian history, five of which were complete fabrications. So, I'm talking about Richie Benaud serving in the Senate. Australia's first Prime Minister was an atheist to Captain James Cook had three wives, that kind of thing. — ABC Radio Brisbane Breakfast, 21st September, 2009

Sydneysiders were the most gullible, Melburnians the least - the sort of comparison that's bound to get a silly survey like this plenty of coverage.

And indeed the Levitt Institute did well. Around 33 radio stations plus Fairfax and News Ltd websites gave it a run.

It even made it onto Ten's bright new news-comedy show, the 7pm Project:

Charlie Pickering: Now in a report out today we found that young Australians are extremely gullible. — Channel Ten, The 7pm Project, 21st September, 2009

News website Crikey's deputy editor, Sophie Black, said we shouldn't believe all we read...

Sophie Black: Once upon a time you'd read it in the newspaper and you knew that a hundred different fact-checkers had checked the story, a sub-editor, an editor, but these days information and news is put up so quickly that, you know, there's no one there to check it... — Channel Ten, The 7pm Project, 21st September, 2009

Ah Sophie, how true.

And certainly, none of these worthy news outlets seems to have bothered to check up on the Levitt Institute.

But as the web-enthusiasts say, the media may get more stuff wrong these days, but it doesn't stay wrong for long.

That same day, Media Watch received an email from a very savvy viewer about:

... what appears to be a lovely self fulfilling hoax... — Email from tipster to Media Watch, 21st September, 2009

Our tipster had checked up on the Levitt Institute.

Though it claims to have been founded in 2007...

... I established that their domain www.levittinstitute.org was only registered on 8 September this year. — Email from tipster to Media Watch, 21st September, 2009

The tipster then Googled the name of the Institute's founder, Dr Carl Varnsen and found very little, except a reference in Wikipedia to a:

List of Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich people. — Wikipedia

...where, amid a panoply of Nobel Prizewinners and the like, under:

Other Notable Alumni... — Wikipedia

...is the entry:

Carl Varnsen Public intellectual and leading sociologist in Australia. — Wikipedia

Public intellectual? How come none of us have ever heard of him?

Our tipster pointed out:

This reference was added on 11 September 2009... — Email from tipster to Media Watch, 21st September, 2009

Of course, there was another bloke who used the name Karl Varnsen as an alias...

Real Estate Agent: Would you like to see the rest of the apartment, Mr um...? Jerry Seinfeld: Varnsen. Kal Varnsen. — Seinfeld, Season 9, Episode 20

We did some digging of our own. We sent a camera along to the Levitt Institute's address in the Sydney suburb of Chippendale.

Doesn't look very prepossessing, does it? Locked up and derelict, in fact.

And then there's the report itself.

In amongst paragraphs of impenetrable mathematical gibberish is this sentence:

These results were completely made up to be fictitious material through a process of modified truth and credibility nodes. — Report, The Levitt Institute, 12th September, 2009

Enough already. It's all a hoax - a quite elaborate one - designed to make the media look like gullible idiots.

Well, it succeeded.

And the perpetrator, we found out, was itself a media company, Zapruder's Other Films, part-owned by that pillar of rectitude, Andrew Denton.

All was due to be revealed on a new show which starts this very week on this very channel. According to Andrew Denton The Hungry Beast will be:

"...an unusual hybrid of journalism, comedy and... something else..." — ABC Website - Program Summary, Hungry Beast

Something else like, blatant misrepresentation? According to The Hungry Beast's pre-publicity, its young recruits have been put through a rigorous crash course in journalism.

Being taken through ethics, media law, interview technique, writing for television, story conferencing, camera workshops, it covered a huge amount. — Two Thousand website, interview with Hungry Beast web content producer, Elmo Keep

Ethics, eh? Well, AAP don't think much of the ethics of this little exercise.

While this incident has caused us to review our verification procedures,... any fair-minded observer would understand how this hoax, with supporting website, 10-page report, and PR people spruiking the results could deceive a busy reporter facing rolling agency deadlines... No-matter what the rationale behind this hoax, it is cheap and mischievous. — Response from Mike Osborne (Editor, The Australian Associated Press) to Media Watch, 28th September, 2009

Read AAP's full response to Media Watch's questions

No doubt many of you would reckon it's pretty funny too but there's another lesson for the folk at The Hungry Beast in all this: it's a cut-throat world out there. If you think you can put a hoax on the web two weeks before you go to air, without anyone else spotting it you're living in fairyland.

The Beast is much too Hungry for that.