We all know that when you play Chinese whispers, the message is supposed to get folded, spindled or mutilated on the way around the circle. Surely we expect better from our journalistic colleagues?

First in the circle, the folks in Lockport (titled: Barrett Case: Love Triangle Case Unfolds) By all accounts, they have their facts straight. Thomas Montgomery, Brian Barrett, and a West Virginia woman, were engaged in a love triangle. Montgomery is facing second degree murder charges having allegedly shot Barrett. Montgomery, Barrett and the woman used MySpace, Yahoo! Messenger and Pogo.com to communicate with each other. Notice that there is no mention of Second Life here. That's not going to last.
Second around the circle is Niall Stanage from the Guardian, with the piece entitled "From Second Life to Second Degree Murder." He begins by cautioning us not to be too hasty to judge new technology as being necessarily bad simply because it is new, and manages to effectively communicate the facts from the Lockport article. So far so good. However he manages to omit the details of which Internet services were used - this will become almost immediately pertinent.

Stanage then goes on to hold up Second Life as a communication service representative of all unhealthy Internet services that cause a "disengagement from reality" - interesting isn't it, that he had information regarding exactly which services were used in the Barrett case, and yet he uses an unrelated service as an example?

Moving forward, Stanage relates his view of Second Life as a place for "an enormous number of people" to "spend large amounts of time and money on creating and embellishing a fictional identity for themselves." He goes on to make the unsupported claim that MySpace.com is rooted more firmly in the real world - this "spring[s] from its capacity to amplify experiences that would take place whether it existed or not."

Surely Second Life also fits the bill for amplifying experiences that might have taken place in the real world, plus adding the opportunity for other experiences that would not possible without it?

Third in the circle of whispers, Robin Walsh from Spiked (title: Get a First Life) He gets his news from Stanage, and he incorrectly understands Second Life to be the service used in the love triangle: "But this murder is a bit different, allegedly involving a convoluted love triangle based largely in the virtual online game Second Life." (my emphasis).

Walsh goes on to make two comparisions of Second Life to other Internet services: chat rooms, and World of Warcraft. In the first comparison, he equates Second Life to a visual chat room; again, an instance of amplification of experience. Next, World of Warcraft; he states that World of Warcraft (and, he implies, Second Life) is a game requiring virtually no skill, however he later freely admits that "making friends" is a "difficult enterprise[s] that require[s] a lot of hard work and often some pain", which surely occurs in Second Life.

The further the whisper travelled, the more tangled the tale became, and the less factual. Walsh's piece is replete with footnotes and references, but he seems not to have been paying attention to his source material, and his overall delivery isn't very coherent and makes little sense.

Now we're at the point of the timeline where this story begins leaking to blogs and local papers, eventually being picked up by a larger news outlet and probably Jack Thompson (Sorry, Jack, even if you define Second Life as a game, it just wasn't involved). Virtual World! Real Murder! How can the mainstream media resist that?

I've seen respectable national newspapers running headlines from the front page of The Onion, and other parody sites when a freelance journalist submitted something that sounded plausible and had enough shock or controversy to pull in readers.

We can only hope that they actually check their facts on the next round. Tell me, what are the chances?