At some threshold we shouldn’t need to dumb it down any further. I think journalists being able to tell the difference between parody, that’s clearly labelled as parody, and real news is already lower than I’d set that bar.

Ask yourself what’s the value in journalism if they’re just going to build a story off of a tweet with no verification/ fact checking?

People claim they are engineers/doctors/lawyers on the internet all of the time and there is no repercussion. We are only able to actually police those terms when it comes to actual business transactions.

Exposing the failings of the sources of information is always a good thing. Trust is not some resource which is an unconditional good. It must be worthy of it to be any good. Otherwise it is like thinking that if you give your dog all As in premed and med school he will become a capable doctor.

Journalists have a big megaphone. Their job is to amplify truth. If I'm making jokes and being clear about my intentions, but a lazy journalist sees my content as easy clickbait, that's my fault?

What I was tweeting was never "news" let alone "fake news". It was never wrapped deceptively as truth. It wasn't a prank. Someone else took my words, which were obviously and provably not truth, and held them up under their reputation as an authority of truth. Why should I be responsible for the alleged harm that they caused?

In addition, you've completely altered what the author of the blog post was saying. They're not using the dismissive "It's just a prank bro", they've actually written quite a thoughtful post explaining the context behind the incident. They didn't apologise but they didn't need to.

I can grant that it doesn't actually say "parody" in it's description, but we should still be expecting more effort from reporters.