“I will be missed.”

The Today Show's Richard Wilkins made the big-time this week when his embarrassing coverage of the supposed death of Jurassic Park star Jeff Goldblum was featured on The Colbert Report.

Goldblum was shown the cringe-worthy piece of journalism on Colbert's show and concluded he must be dead after all, before proceeding to eulogise himself.

Great stuff, but a sad indictment on the state of journalism. In an age of websites, blogs and social media, where anyone can spread falsehoods as swiftly and as accurately as a game of Chinese whispers, it's truly a rum state of affairs when these sick hoaxes aren't researched before appearing as fact on national television.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Jeff Goldblum Will Be Missed
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Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Jeff Goldblum

Naturally, the whole charade prompted Media Watch's Jonathan Holmes to give Wilkins a well-deserved bollocking on air.

Meanwhile, talk show host Jimmy Kimmel hit the street with the question everyone's been asking: where were you when you found out Jeff Goldblum was still alive?

Newswipe with Charlie Brooker (2009)

Death, crime, war, puppies, the weather. It could only be the news.

I actually began university with the intention of having a career in journalism. However, after sitting through class after class trumpeting fair, balanced and objective reporting as essential, it became clear that real-world journalism was something else entirely.

I remain a news junkie, but my inner cynic always approaches the news with nothing short of an overflowing salt shaker. Quite simply, the news is a manipulative affair, whether it's tugging blindly at its audience's heartstrings, begging for viewers to send in feedback in a bizarre effort to make the news interactive or just plain old scaremongering. As a viewer, it's impossible to feel like anything other than a puppet, the recipient of constant instructions telling us how to think and act. Rarely does the news allow the viewer to come to his or her own conclusions.

What's troubling is the ease with which people do seem to accept whatever the news tells us. Which is what's makes Charlie Brooker's Newswipe must-see television. Brooker writes...

TV news now comes packaged as a dazzling CGI cartoon, with the names of star anchors included in the programme title, and an absurdly theatrical air of bombast underpinning every second of every broadcast. Traditional newspapers, beaten to the punch by the immediacy of the internet and 24-hour news networks, are becoming less and less bothered with breaking actual news than celebrity gossip, or provocative comment, or shouty campaigning. The internet, meanwhile, can be a great source of rapidly updated information, but is also home to an endless range of partisan news sources, paranoid imaginings, and outright hoaxes. Is it possible for anyone to truly know what the hell's going on?

A spin-off of the superb Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, Newswipe takes an acerbic, hilarious, eye-opening look at the news. Like his terrific Guardian columns, Brooker hits the bull's-eye on pretty much every issue – adding a healthy shot of humour to the proceedings.

Because I'm a kind soul, here is the entire fourth episode of Newswipe (in three bite-sized chunks) dedicated to the recent G20 summit in London. If you're a news junkie like me, this is fascinating viewing. If you're not, watch it anyway. If anyone should tell you how to think and act, it's Charlie Brooker.