All of this comes from a great technology blog call The Raw Feed.

I have the entire post copied below, but without embedded links that was with the original article.  Of course if you visit the original post, which I encourage you to do, you can visit the links that were originally included.

How fake Michael Jackson news scooped everyone

Shortly after news reports surfaced that pop star Michael Jackson was taken to the hospital with cardiac arrest, someone posted a fake news story that he had died. (Here’s a screen capture of that story.) The story was created on a Web site called “Fake a Wish – Celeb Fake News Generator.” The fake news story appeared to have been published by a Global Associated News, which doesn’t actually exist. Twitter tweets linking to the fake story were exceeding 10 per second for more than a half hour. At some point, the site TMZ reported an un-sourced story that Jackson had died. My working thesis is that they fell for the Global Associated News prank. But then Drudge Report and other major sites linked to the TMZ story, and reported Jackson’s death as fact. All that happened before the actual scoop, which was this blog post by The Los Angeles Times. Well after the L.A. Times story, the original TMZ piece was updated and made respectable with sources specified.

I can’t prove it, but I think TMZ fell for the hoax, hundreds or thousands of news organizations all over the world linked to the TMZ story, but then the fake story became real when Jackson died nearly an hour later.

The remaining question for TMZ was: Was their story based on the fake news report? If not, they should tell everyone what it was based on.

Very, very interesting.

But I have a feeling that TMZ has hospital employees of all the local LA hospitals on their payroll to get the scoop on things.