They started as a joke, the journalism warning labels posted by British comedian Tom Scott.

Scott wrote on a blog post:

It seems a bit strange to me that the media carefully warn about and label any content that involves sex, violence or strong language -- but there's no similar labelling system for, say, sloppy journalism and other questionable content.

I figured it was time to fix that, so I made some stickers. I've been putting them on copies of the free papers that I find on the London Underground. You might want to as well.

See them HERE.

But the labels also sparked some serious review by Poynter.org's Latoya Peterson.

She writes:

Scott's joke played into existing consumer attitudes about the trustworthiness and reliability of modern news coverage. Gallup recently published the 2010 results of its Confidence in Institutions poll. Once again, news media fared higher than Congress, but that isn't saying much.

Only 25 percent of respondents have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers, and 22 percent said the same for television news. Neither institution has fared very well in the periodic survey. When Gallup started asking about confidence in newspapers in 1973, 39 percent expressed confidence. When TV news was added in 1993, 46 percent expressed confidence.