A real pisser of a mistake
Man gets trapped in car after an avalanche. Man has 60 half-liter bottles of beer with him. Man drinks beer and 
urinates his way to freedom.
Sound too good to be true? It is — the story is an Internet hoax, but the folks at Ananova and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution didn’t know that, and happily ran the item as real news. In fact, the AJC ran the item twice — once on February 2 an once on February 11. Here is the Feb. 11 story. And here is the Ananova story.
AJC editor Julia Wallace penned an apology that appeared on February 22. Here it is:
A
column on page 3 of the Feb. 11 Wheels section recounted a story about
a man who survived an avalanche in Slovakia. A one-paragraph synopsis
of this story also appeared in Atlanta & the World on Feb. 2. In
fact, the story is a myth circulating via the Internet and e-mail. The
Feb. 11 column repeated a common Internet version almost verbatim and
without attribution. The Feb. 2 synopsis was culled from the Web site
of a British tabloid. We are reviewing the freelance and editing
procedures that allowed these items to get in the newspaper. We’ll
report back on what we find and changes we plan to make. We work hard
to make sure what you read is accurate and original. In these cases, we
let you down. I apologize.
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