One of Fianna Fáil's rising stars has just announced that he's moving his election campaign to the internet. Dublin councillor Aidan McEvoy said he is "astonished" at the success of his webcasted constituency clinics to date.

"Every week, I get at least 60,000 people tuning in for my 15-minute session," he explained. "About 100,000 people check out my blog every week".

McEvoy, a prospective candidate for the party in north Dublin, says he is now phasing out face-to-face meetings ahead of next year's general election. "I can meet more people online than I'd ever meet through holding clinics in pubs or community centres. I aim to become the first cyberspace TD."

Of course, McEvoy and his online ambitions are a figment of Discotheque's imagination. Even if we could believe that any Irish politician would forsake the rounds of parish functions and funerals to rely solely on webcasted appearances, the figures quoted above just do not stack up.

Some 60,000 people watching a webcast by a local politician? Some 100,000 people a week reading an Irish politician's blog? You would expect the media to tear such claims apart and pack Councillor McEvoy off to join Royston Brady in the land of the politically bewildered.

Yet substitute "Sandi Thom" for "Aidan McEvoy" and "concerts in her piss-stained basement" for "constituency clinics" and it's a whole different ball-game. Press releases about the unknown singer-songwriter (albeit an unknown singer-songwriter who already had publishing, recording and management deals, and had hired a heavyweight PR company) are reheated. Unsubstantiated claims about finding an online audience are repeated. The myth is printed.

But it's not just Sandi Thom. When it comes to entertainment stories in the media generally, the gullibility of journalists is quite staggering. Smart PR flacks and flunkeys can get away with murder simply because music and movie stories are, by and large, viewed as soft content on the news pages and even on some of the entertainment pages as well.

Use a nice pic, make sure there's a product or event tie-in and, bingo, there's a lot of column inches in the bag. There's certainly little chance of anyone asking some awkward questions about that supposedly sold-out tour of Portugal which the singer is just back from.

Even when questions are asked, there's a huge ignorance on display about how the actual music industry works. Last week, there was much coverage of how Alan McGee was scammed by a fictional band he had came across on MySpace. The man who found Oasis liked what he heard of Hope Against Hope and offered them a show at his Death Disco club.

But it turned out that the band in question had been assembled by a Q magazine writer and the music was by someone else. It was, hurrahed the press, this year's great rock'n'roll swindle and the ex-Creation big cheese had been caught.

It was nothing of the sort. "They call that a scam?" McGee asked one reporter. "Do me a favour. A scam is selling your record label for £30 million to Sony. When I pull off a scam, I walk away millions of pounds richer."

Leaving aside the fact that a better scam would be to sell a record label with no acts at all to Sony (as has happened at least once to this writer's knowledge), McGee is completely right. Hope Against Hope did not perpetrate a scam, but simply showed how MySpace works. They asked thousands of fellow MySpace users to become their friends and some, including McGee, did.

But this didn't become the story, because the reporter would then have to point out that breaking a band still involves hefty amounts of old-fashioned promotional activity (such as radio airplay and print features) and writing some decent tunes as well as having loads of MySpace friends. Better to crow about McGee getting punked for trying to help an act whose music he thought was OK rather than doing some in-depth analysis about MySpace.

Readers deserve better. After all, you wouldn't let the likes of Councillor McEvoy away with lying or embellishing the truth, would you?