Somewhere in the great city of Austin, James W. Conradt is really, really, really glad this week is over. It might just have been the worst of his life.

The 36-year-old University of Nebraska fan living in the land of Longhorns, Conradt usurped a template from newsok.com to perpetrate a hoax about University of Oklahoma quarterbacks Sam Bradford and Landry Jones for about an hour on a Cornhusker message board.

The hoax was that Bradford and Jones had been busted with several kilos of coke at a party. I did not read the fake story. As I noted before, it might have been up for an hour before officials with OPUBCO, The Oklahoman's parent company, issued cease-and-desist warnings.

Subsequently, the publishing company and the father of Landry Jones have threatened to sue the University of Texas IT worker. Kevin Jones was quoted as saying he had deep pockets and was going to "prosecute Conradt to the fullest extent of the law," as if he were a federal marshal.

And then on Friday, Oklahoman columnist Berry Tramel posted a video on newsok.tv aligning college sports message boards with porn sites, suggesting that anybody who participates on these boards (even those who do so passively) are at least partially culpable in any libel against the two OU players. This piece of editorializing came just a day or so after a Tramel blog post portrayed Conradt as pathetic and pitiful, asking OU fans to show some mercy on him.

I've got news for you.

We're all guilty on this one.

First and foremost, what Conradt put together was not satire, as a writer for The Lost Ogle suggested. A famous advertisement from the early 1980s suggesting that Jerry Falwell's mother had sex with animals, or whatever it was, in the family outhouse, was satire and was not deemed to be libelous because it comes off to a reasonable person as obviously untrue.

A false news story about two kids being busted with drugs, using the template of a major newspaper's Web site, is absolutely libelous. However, I think OU fans have jumped off the cliff on this one. And, I think Tramel is completely off base, too.

And I'm going to tell you why.

The difference between what Bob Barry Jr. referred to as the Wild, Wild West on The Sports Animal radio station Friday morning and what conservative bloggers have historically referred to as the MSM (Mainstream Media) is in the role of gatekeeper.

In Journalism 101, the gatekeeper is he who decides what makes the nightly news. The newspaper. The radio show. The Web site.

All of us who create content anywhere accessible to the public are gatekeepers of information. And part of that responsibility is in accepting accountability for anything posted. It means double-checking facts, and it means not relying on message board fodder for them.

Two Texas radio stations reported what Conradt posted to the Nebraska message board as news, and that's super, super embarrassing for them. It should be. First, the URL of the fake story gave itself away:

http://69.49.239.85/newsok/sports/sooners/In%20search%20of%20the%20next%20Sooner%20QB%20_%20NewsOK.com.htm

Did anybody bother to visit http://69.49.239.85/?

Did anybody question why the story wasn't on newsok.com?

Did anybody bother to check other sources, such as espn.com or cbssports.com or tulsaworld.com?

We as consumers of information have to take some responsibility for vetting it. I've got an aunt who likes to send me right-wing propaganda, e-mails suggesting that Barack Obama is not only a Muslim, but he's also a communist, a Satanist, and he will make Spanish the official language of our country while raising our taxes to 68 percent.

And I know liberals who do the same.

In this case, Conradt posted plausible information on a template showing the marks of a credible news Web site. However, the URL was so obviously fake that savvy Web surfers, particularly message board posters and participants, should have sniffed this out immediately.

Is Conradt guilty of copyright infringement? You bet. Is he guilty of libel? Technically, yes, although I can't imagine this actually did any damage to Bradford and Jones. I heard a colleague of mine say today that future employers or lenders might spot this info and deny Landry and Sam a job, and again I say: ridiculous.

The responsibility to be able to vet information falls on all of us, whether we're surfers or posters or employers or lenders. Conradt not only knew what he did was wrong, he rectified it and expressed deep remorse in an interview with The Oklahoman.

The University of Texas determined that its employee didn't post this hoax during company time, and I presume they did not decide to fire him. Nor should they have. Frankly, I hope Conradt might see this and understand that not all OU fans jumped off the deep end on this one. And I don't presume he's pathetic or pitiful either.

He made a mistake, and that's it. The world doesn't have to be so black and white.

However, this isn't cause to throw all message-board participants under the proverbial bus, either.

In his newsok.tv video, Tramel suggested that college sports Internet message boards had no more redeeming value on them than a porn site.

Hey, why attack porn? The Internet IS for porn!, I'm told. By puppets. I digress.

Sports Animal host Carey Murdock made the stretch to suggest that Tramel was comparing message-board enthusiasts to porn addicts, although I can see technically how the stretch came about. Murdock has made a name for himself locally via his Web work, from the birth of boomersooner.net to his work with rivals.com.

Being in the Web biz, Murdock should have known better though, particularly as it pertains to my argument that any Web savvy consumer would have been able to spot Conradt's post as a fake in five seconds. However, Murdock was still furious about this incident Friday morning.

The underlying problem here isn't some supposed libel or message boards or James Conradt or Berry Tramel.

It's anonymity.

My personal policy is that if I can't put my name to it, I don't do it. I don't have time nor the interest to read college sports message boards, and I certainly don't post to them. Because of the anonymity allowed by most of these sites, the discourse is often uncivil, and the information is virtually worthless.

Sorry, Carey.

On the other hand, Tramel's argument about message boards is disingenuous at best. One reader on The Lost Ogle, a site I've already mentioned and that I should note I enjoy daily, noted that consumers don't want to wait 24 hours to read about what happened five seconds ago.

Amen! Couldn't have said it better myself.

Newspaper types are uber defensive when it comes to the Web. Heck, most traditional media are. However, the folks who participate on message boards are just talking with their friends, gloating over wins, berating other schools, arguing, cutting each other down and doing a ton of stuff that, in my humble opinion, does nothing but issue negative energy into the universe.

The people I know who participate on OU and OSU message boards are terrific people, some of my best friends, outside of said boards. They are productive members of society. They go to church. They mow their yards. They pay their bills. They care for their kids. They are solid citizens.

However, the anonymous personae of these people on these and most all other message boards are unfunny, mean-spirited smack talkers who would never deign to behave that way in front of their wife or kids. Take away the anonymity on college sports message boards, and not only will civility increase, so will credibility.

There are drawbacks to forbidding anonymity, but I can't see those negatives as they might pertain to a sports site. On the other hand, the drawbacks TO anonymity are obvious and were played out this week in the form of the OU Internet hoax because there is no way James Conradt would have done what he did if he had been forced to associate his name with it in the first place.

On the other hand, message boards themselves aren't bad places nor are the people who participate on them. The anonymity they allow, however, encourages good people to behave at their collective worst.

I'll say it again though: If we're going to live in a free society, we have to get better about being able to analyze information and vet it for crap. In this case, that two radio stations reported Conradt's fake information as news is a complete journalistic embarrassment -- and that any regular Web surfer couldn't figure out in five seconds that Conradt's story was bogus is too.

So, blame Conradt. Blame the message board folks. But blame us as consumers, too. That anybody got duped by this is silly.