October 13, 2008 – 8:00 am
In today’s Times, Noam Cohen looks at how fake news ends up being reported as true:
IN 1864, back when rumor still traveled by foot, a young messenger walked into the newsrooms of New York City’s press row with an Associated Press bulletin that President Lincoln had ordered the conscription of 400,000 additional troops for the [...]
Contrary to a statement in a column yesterday (Since when did trying to have your photograph taken constitute a threat to national security?, page 5, G2) the Metropolitan police do not require professional photographers operating in central London to hold a police permit and wear a radio-linked ID tag. The material on which this part [...]
I’m a bit late to this one, but this hoax was picked up by a decent number of publications. Murray Dick has a good summary:
The story in question (now amended, here) concerned the conviction of a 13-year old Texan boy for stealing his dad’s credit card and using it to hire two prostitutes with which [...]
March 27, 2008 – 10:19 pm
How did the Los Angeles Times not realize it was being duped during its six-month investigation into the shooting of Tupac Shakur?
The paper has apologized for relying on forged documents in reporting a story about a 1994 attack on Shakur. The Times story took months of reporting and preparation; The Smoking Gun took roughly a [...]
January 10, 2008 – 8:00 am
TechCrunch has the tale of a French man who earned himself some major French press coverage after declaring he’d been selected as the new worldwide president of Facebook. In fact, he had simply earned the empty title based on a third-party Facebook application “that was aimed at designating, every quarter, a new ‘Facebook Worldwide president,’ [...]
January 7, 2008 – 8:00 am
Pakistan: Rosa Brooks’ Thursday column about political dynasties cited a quote from Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s Facebook profile. Facebook has since found the entries to be “not authentic” and disabled them. Link
Our May 30 story headed “Uuurrgh! My Corgi kebab is a bit ruff” said that Yoko Ono was on a radio show and “tasted” dog meat which was being eaten by an animal rights activist.
The report, which was filed to us by several leading press agencies was wholly wrong and Ms Ono did not appear [...]
October 16, 2006 – 8:00 am
Two Alabama newspapers ran stories about a soldier who said she joined the Army after her daughter was injured in Iraq. After the stories ran, however, the Army revealed that he story wasn’t true. By then, the Associated press had already picked up one of the stories, sending it over the wire. The Hunstville Times, [...]
September 28, 2006 – 10:05 pm
A boy named Cassidy Grigg made the rounds of the morning shows Thursday, hitting the Today show on NBC, The Early Show on CBS, and Good Morning America on ABC. He said he was in the Colorado classroom when gunman Duane Morrison entered. Morrison eventually took six girls hostage and murdered one before killing himself. [...]
September 28, 2006 – 8:00 am
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — In a Sept. 26 story about the death of Paul Van Valkenburgh, The Associated Press, relying on information from his wife, erroneously reported that he was co-writer of the 1960 hit song “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” under the name Paul Vance.
The American Society for Composers, Authors and [...]
September 7, 2006 – 8:00 am
A Tallahassee Democrat story spotted by Romenesko:
Don Spille said he lost almost everything in Hurricane Katrina, including his home in Kenner, La., and his father, who lived in coastal
Mississippi.
The Tallahassee Democrat even ran a front-page story about Spille and his family Tuesday to coincide with the one-year anniversary of Katrina. But there was at least [...]
A site called Gullible.info that serves up fake trivia recently saw one of its invented factoids end up in a story in the Guardian. Here’s the original June 2005 post from Gullible.info:
LSD guru Timothy Leary claimed to have discovered an extra primary color he referred to as “gendale.”
From there it made its way into a [...]
Earlier this morning, a press release was put on i-Newswire, a free online press release distribution service, claiming that Will Ferrell died in a paragliding accident yesterday. Here is the first sentence of the release:
“Los Angeles — Actor Will Ferrell accidentally died in a freak para-gliding accident yesterday in Torey Pines, Southern California.”
We’d love to [...]
February 6, 2006 – 8:00 am
On Thursday the Trentonian newspaper reported about a New Jersey radio DJ who had a heated exchange with Ryan Seacrest about whether or not he was gay. From the story:
“Ryan,” Carton said, “Are you gay?”
Silence.
“Ryan, are you a homosexual?”
With that, Seacrest was headed for the door.
“I can’t stay here, man,” Seacrest said. “I gotta jet.”
The [...]
January 9, 2006 – 8:00 am
On Thursday, December 29, a man walked into the offices of the Waterloo Cedar-Falls Courier and handed in an obituary for 17 year-old Daniel “D.J.” Reddout. The obituary ran the next day.
As the Courier would later explain, “The item said the West High student passed away at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., Dec. 24, [...]
December 6, 2004 – 10:58 am
BBC TV and Radio fell victim to a hoaxer last week. A man who said his name was Jude Finisterra and claimed to be a spokesman for Dow Chemical went on the air at the Beeb and said Dow was taking full responsibility for the 1984 Bhopal disaster, and had set up a $12 billion [...]
December 2, 2004 – 8:00 am
A Washington Post correction demonstrates one fallibility when interviewing people on the street — journalists never ask them for ID to prove they are who they say they are. (Not that we’re suggesting they do; It’s just hard to protect against folks who willingly mislead the media.)
This reminds us of one priceless example from a [...]
