The Sun (U.K.) recently reported in a front page story that several famous Jews were being targeted by Muslim extremists. Then, on Tuesday, it published an article noting that it had fallen for a hoax:
A PHONEY terrorism “expert” has confessed to duping newspapers and a senior politician.
Glen Jenvey has admitted making up stories about Islamic fundamentalism, including a faked list of prominent Jewish “targets”, which included Lord Alan Sugar.
He revealed his scheming in an interview with BBC reporter Tom Mangold, aired on Sunday’s edition of Donal MacIntyre’s Radio Five Live show.
Jenvey told how he fabricated the list of Jewish targets by posing as a fundamentalist on an extremist website where he urged others to suggest names.
He then leaked the made-up list to a trusted news agency, used by The Sun, and online forum Ummah.com was wrongly accused of being used to prepare a backlash against UK Jews.
Jenvey – who had been described as “an extremely capable and knowledgeable analyst” by Tory MP Patrick Mercer – said: “I’m fully responsible for the story. The Sun was deceived …
But the paper hasn’t apologized or formally corrected its report. From the Guardian:
The Sun today admitted that its front page story claiming Lord Alan Sugar was a Jewish “target” of extremist Muslims was wrong.
But the paper did not apologise or offer a correction to readers about the 7 January story, which carried the headline “Terror Target Sugar”. The story quoted claims by “anti-terror expert” Glen Jenvey that online Muslim forum Ummah.com was being used by extremists to target leading British Jews in revenge for Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
Later that month MediaGuardian.co.uk reported claims that Jenvey was responsible for the posts on the website.
The Sun story named Sugar, singer Amy Winehouse, producer Mark Ronson and Labour peer Lord Levy as among those allegedly being targeted by Islamic extremists.
News International’s daily tabloid subsequently removed the story, which carried the bylines of John Coles and Mike Sullivan, from its website. The story came from the news agency South West News.
Jenvey has also appeared on BBC2’s Newsnight as a terror expert commenting on internet monitoring of extremist groups …
An excerpt of a very detailed account from Wired:
All of Germany was bamboozled Thursday by a bizarre scheme that tricked the country’s main wire service into reporting an attempted suicide bombing in a California town — an attack supposedly perpetrated by a non-existent rap group called the “Berlin Boys.”
The hoax has transfixed this country. It prompted a 1,000-word tome on the website of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s most respected newspaper, and even a press conference denouncing the incident by the DPA – the German wire service responsible for first disseminating the news about the “attack.”
The hoax’s effect was felt thousands of miles away, as a flood of concerned phone calls from Germany jammed the switchboards at the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s office, which has jurisdiction over the supposed bombing site in California.
“This is frustrating and a waste of our resources,” said office spokesman Arden Wiltshire, who was awakened at 5 a.m. Thursday to try and sort out the crisis. Wiltshire worries that dispatchers could have missed important calls to deal with the Germans.
“We’re sorry for what happened; we, too, were victimized,” said Justus Demmer, a DPA spokesman. “What we have learned today is if there’s someone committed to betray you, it’s very hard to stop it.” …
Thanks, Jon!
An interview purporting to be with Banksy in last Saturday’s Guide (One last thing . . . , 18 July, page 98, the Guide) was, it transpires, conducted with someone impersonating the graffiti artist. We apologise to Banksy for this error and for any offence and inconvenience caused. Link
Thanks, Daniel!
Romenesko spotted a story in the Ahwatukee Foothills News that details how the paper fell for a rather elaborate hoax. Using his mother and what appears to be at least one accomplice to add credibility, 21 year-old Vinayak Gorur convinced the paper that he was a chef on the rise. From the paper’s account:
…wow, did it sound like a zinger of a story. Gorur had gone to Arizona State University after graduating from Desert Vista, but moved on to pursue his love for cooking when he received a scholarship to the prestigious Scottsdale Culinary Institute. While at SCI, he won an award from the American Culinary Federation that gave him a $3,500 stipend to travel to Aspen, Colo. And to top it all off, armed with his ACF award, the prestigious Compass Restaurant in downtown Phoenix hired him as their youngest sous chef.
After interviewing Gorur, who showed up in our offices with his mother, I was impressed by his intelligence, ambition and polite manner. I also phoned his supervisor at the Compass Restaurant, Chef Greg Aberdeen, who gave me quotes full of glowing compliments for Gorur.
In reality, chef Greg Aberdeen didn’t exist. Eventually, some people who know Gorur contacted the paper to help set things straight:
Two of Gorur’s friends, Berg and Andrew Cole, eventually brought Gorur’s chef fantasy to a crashing halt. Cole has known Gorur since they were in first grade together and, according to Cole, the two had been close friends until about a year ago.
Cole and Berg said that Gorur has a long history of making stories up to make himself sound better, but that they were surprised he had gone so far with this story.
“I’m surprised that he would try to trick a whole community by making this public,” Cole said. “He makes up extravagant stories frequently to impress people, which he really doesn’t need to do.”
Cole is not sure if Gorur understands how serious his lies have become now that he has made them public.
“I don’t think he processes the consequences of his lies,” Cole said. “We all lie when we’re young to get out of small things, but Vinayak never grew out of it.”
As for his mother’s involvement, she believed her son’s story because he’d convinced a reporter to write about it. Yes, that’s quite remarkable:
Gorur’s parents, who he lives with, seem to be just as confused as Cole about Gorur’s issues. Both parents said that they were not sure if Gorur was telling the truth about working at the Compass Restaurant, but that since the newspaper was writing about it, they assumed it was actually true.
The Phoenix New Times also has a good summary of the hoax.
A short item in a football roundup hinted at a £2m move to Middlesbrough for Serbian striker Rajko Purovic (Transfer talk, 11 June, page 4). This story was based on a web hoax. For reasons we have been unable to divine, it appeared in the paper under the byline of a reporter who was on holiday at the time. Link
A report from the Guardian:
The editor-in-chief of an academic journal has resigned after his publication accepted a hoax article.
The Open Information Science Journal failed to spot that the incomprehensible computer-generated paper was a fake. This was despite heavy hints from its authors, who claimed they were from the Centre for Research in Applied Phrenology – which forms the acronym Crap.
The journal, which claims to subject every paper to the scrutiny of other academics, so-called "peer review", accepted the paper.
Philip Davis, a graduate student at Cornell University in New York, who was behind the hoax, said he wanted to test the editorial standards of the journal’s publisher, Bentham Science Publishers…
Davis, with the help of Kent Anderson, a member of the publishing team at the New England Journal of Medicine, created the hoax computer science paper. The pair submitted their paper, Deconstructing Access Points, under false names. Four months later, they were told it had been accepted and the fee to have it published was $800 (almost £500).
Davis then withdrew the paper and revealed it as a hoax. Bambang Parmanto has since stepped down as editor-in-chief of the Open Information Science Journal. Parmanto told New Scientist that he never saw the paper.
Mahmood Alam, Bentham’s director of publications, told New Scientist: "In this particular case, we were aware that the article submitted was a hoax and we tried to find out the identity of the individual by pretending the article had been accepted for publication when in fact it was not." Davis told the magazine that he had not been directly contacted…
A Page 1 story Friday on Beccah Beushausen’s Internet hoax about a terminally ill baby described her as a social worker. While she has worked in social services, she says she is not a licensed social worker. The Tribune confirmed that she has worked at women’s crisis centers in Tinley Park and Pittsburgh. Also, the caption with a photo from Beushausen’s blog said the woman pictured was not her. That’s what Beushausen initially told the Tribune, but the charity that took the picture said it was indeed her, and she later acknowledged that she was the woman in the picture. Link
An obituary of Maurice Jarre (31 March, page 36) opened with a quotation which we are now advised had been invented as a hoax, and was never said by the composer: “My life has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life.” The article closed with: “Music is how I will be remembered,” said Jarre. “When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head and that only I can hear.” These quotes appear to have originated as a deliberate insertion in the composer’s Wikipedia entry in the wake of his death on 28 March, and from there were duplicated on various internet sites. Link
A line in a feature yesterday about a 1999 school shooting in Colorado was wrong to say that in a similar episode recently at a high school in Winnenden, Germany, the perpetrator signalled his intent in an internet chatroom (The truth about Columbine, page 12). That supposed chatroom warning was exposed as a hoax. Link
In The Daily Observer of Wednesday, April 1, a story ran as an April Fool’s joke on the front page that upset many readers. It was intended to amuse and entertain, and not meant to offend anyone. We apologize if some found it offensive. Link
Some background from the Ottawa Citizen:
A Pembroke newspaper that drew criticism Wednesday for an April Fool’s joke about the discovery of a native burial ground has issued an apology. The Pembroke Daily Observer apologized Thursday after a representative from a native group and the Mayor of Pembroke both condemned the paper’s attempt at humour.
“In The Daily Observer of Wednesday, April 1, a story ran as an April Fool’s joke on the front page that upset many readers. It was intended to amuse and entertain, and not meant to offend anyone. We apologize if some found it offensive,” said the apology on the paper’s website.
The newspaper’s annual April Fool’s joke Wednesday said construction at Pembroke Regional Hospital was halted Tuesday with the discovery of “an ancient native burial ground.”
The fabricated story went on to attribute quotes to Chuck Strahl, minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, and Kirby Whiteduck, chief of the nearby Algonquins of Pikwakanagan. According to the story, Strahl said Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke MP Cheryl Gallant could not attend a meeting on the matter because she was too “pale.” It also said that native protesters had set up tents across from the construction site.
Okwarakon Sharbot, of the Haudenoshonee Confederacy, near Belleville, said Wednesday she was “appalled that somebody would put that in a newspaper that they were considering even digging up ancestral remains.” …
Thanks, Steve!
The folks at Writer’s Digest have a new guide to go along with their Writer’s Market series of books and services. Details are here, but the cover says it all. Get yours today!
A story from TheLocal.de:
An article poking fun at the lengthy name of new Economy Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg turned out to be a joke on some of the biggest names in the German media after it was revealed they had been tricked by a Wikipedia prankster.
On Sunday February 8, the evening before Guttenberg was officially named to replace the outgoing Michael Glos, someone decided to add the name “Wilhelm” to his already prolix name on his Wikipedia entry: Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jakob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. “Freiherr,” for the record, is the title of Baron.
“I asked myself if anyone would notice if I simply added one more entry to the long list of names,” the anonymous Wikipedia poster wrote in a guest commentary for the media critique site bildblog.de on Tuesday. “It turns out that no one noticed, and scores of online media, newspapers and television stations used my invention without verifying it.”
Mass-circulation daily Bild ran the incorrect name and photo above the front-page headline, “Do we have to remember this name?” on Monday, poking fun at his aristocratic roots. Meanwhile the mistake ran in major publications across the country, including Germany’s leading news site Spiegel Online, which reported that journalists took pleasure in asking Guttenberg to recite his name.
Bloggers and media critics have triumphed at the coup, calling a “declaration of bankruptcy” for journalistic ethics.
Along with other papers across the country, both Bild and Spiegel Online published corrections, but their tone seemed less apologetic than irritated at having had their reliance on Wikipedia revealed. On Thursday Bild wrote that the 37-year-old had been the “victim of a falsification” that many media sources, “including Bild, fell into.” But the correction included a final dig at the new minister by adding that instead of 11 names, he had “‘just’ ten” names.
Meanwhile Spiegel Online corrected its mistake as soon as it was discovered, attributing it to “a manipulation of the internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia and insufficient research by Spiegel Online.” But in another article about the incident published on Thursday, it chalked up the embarrassing gaffe to “time pressure that was great.” …
Thanks, Steve!
A correction from HuffPo:
The Huffington Post has learned that the below video has been doctored. We regret the error and apologize to Mr. Gibson. John Gibson never compared Eric Holder to a monkey with a bright blue scrotum.
Rather, as seen in the unedited video below, Gibson played audio of Holder saying “nation of cowards” — so his full, unedited remarks were:
“We were talking about Eric Holder today on the radio and his comment that this is a nation of cowards.”
The video was doctored to include Trace Gallagher’s voice saying, “bright blue scrotum” where Gibson played Holder’s “nation of cowards” remark. The Huffington Post does not know the source of the video’s doctoring — it was picked up off TVNewser.
The Huffington Post regrets the error. – Alex Leo and Danny Shea
Here’s the offending report:
At the end of a long and pointless conversation between two Fox News reporters covering a zoo escape, John Gibson compared Attorney General Eric Holder to a monkey.
A monkey escaped from the Woodland park Zoo in Seattle and despite the fact that authorities are “taking this very seriously,” Julie Banderas and Harris Faulkner were not, cracking jokes about the monkeys’ bright blue scrotum.
At 2:48, they toss to John Gibson who complains that he can’t get away with saying “bright blue scrotum” on the radio then follows that up by saying, “We were talking about Eric Holder today on the radio and his bright blue scrotum.”
Here’s what Gibson actually said:
Thanks, Jeff!
Romenesko spotted this article/admission in the Phoenix New Times:
In this week’s cover story, In the Flesh, we reported that NBA Commissioner David Stern would seek a proposed “tattoo cap” on NBA players at the end of the 2011 season.
Turns out, the proposed tat cap is a hoax.
We picked up the story from Foxsports.com, but the spoof article, “NBA Pushes for Tattoo Cap, Players Association Resists,” was originally published on the Gerbil Sports Network blog of Con Chapman. It turns out that Chapman’s a serious sports journalist — sometimes. His The Year of the Gerbil is a non-fiction book about the 1978 Red Sox-Yankees pennant race. But his blog site features spoof and humor pieces…
The New Times reporter actually went and interviewed NBA players about the proposed ban.
A letter published in the British Medical Journal:
Perhaps after 34 years it’s time for us to confess that we invented cello scrotum.
Reading Curtis’s 1974 letter to the BMJ on guitar nipple, we thought it highly likely to be a spoof and decided to go one further by submitting a letter pretending to have noted a similar phenomenon in cellists, signed by the non-doctor one of us (JMM). Anyone who has ever watched a cello being played would realise the physical impossibility of our claim.
Somewhat to our astonishment, the letter was published. The following Christmas we sent a card to Dr Curtis of guitar nipple fame, only to discover that he knew nothing about it—another joke we suspect.
We have been dining out on this story ever since. We were thrilled once more to be quoted in “A symphony of maladies.”
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;334:b288
Elaine Murphy, member1, John M Murphy, chairman21 House of Lords, London SW1A 0PW, 2 St Peter’s Brewery, St Peter South Elmham, Bungay, Suffolk NR35 1NQ
The original letter isn’t online, nor is the guitar nipple submission. Here’s the recent BMJ article article that mentions both. And, yes, one of the perpetrators of the hoax is a member of the House of Lords.
Thanks, Leo!
A New York Times Editors’ Note (Via Romenesko):
Earlier this morning, we posted a letter that carried the name of Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, sharply criticizing Caroline Kennedy.
This letter was a fake. It should not have been published.
Doing so violated both our standards and our procedures in publishing signed letters from our readers.
We have already expressed our regrets to Mr. Delanoë’s office and we are now doing the same to you, our readers.
This letter, like most Letters to the Editor these days, arrived by email. It is Times procedure to verify the authenticity of every letter. In this case, our staff sent an edited version of the letter to the sender of the email and did not hear back. At that point, we should have contacted Mr. Delanoë’s office to verify that he had, in fact, written to us.
We did not do that. Without that verification, the letter should never have been printed.
We are reviewing our procedures for verifying letters to avoid such an incident in the future. Link
Yesterday saw the execution of a remarkable ruse: hoaxsters printed 1.2 million copies of a fake edition of the New York Times and passed them out in U.S. cities. They also put up a fake website, and issued a press release.
The edition carried the headline “Iraq War Ends,” and featured a variety of articles. It also included some invented corrections. The corrections focus on media accountability, the death toll in Iraq, editorial independence, the environment, and media concentration. These fake corrections carry a serious message. You can read them all on this page, but here are a few samples:
“Special Interests”
The Times has in the past used the term “special interests” to describe unions, environmentalists and even whole ethnic groups, and has used the word “pandering” when politicians take these groups’ concerns into account. We have typically not, however, used “pandering” to refer to politicians catering to the interests of corporations. The Times regrets that our use of such language may have given the impression that the interests of corporations are more important than those of citizens.Portraits of Grief
From September 14 to December 31, 2001, the New York Times published “Portraits of Grief,” daily obituaries of the victims of the September 11 attacks. We are proud of this coverage, which won several awards. Tomorrow, the Times begins part two of the series with obituaries of the civilians and soldiers killed between 2001 and today in Afghanistan and Iraq. Two soldiers, and one hundred civilians, will be very briefly memorialized each day, adding a full fold-out page to each edition. The series will continue for thirty years. (Estimates of the number of Iraqis who have died violent deaths since the 2003 invasion vary from 100,000 to well over one million. The Times apologizes for consistently using only the low end of this spectrum of estimates.)Media Monopoly
The Times apologizes for under-reporting the effects and dangers of media consolidation, perhaps due to our own efforts at media consolidation: The Times owns almost two dozen regional newspapers, a number of television and radio stations, and partial shares in the Red Sox and the Discovery Channel. We now recognize this conflict of interest. No newspaper should concern itself with maximizing profits, and the paper of record should be held to an even higher standard than the rest of the publishing industry. Over the next two months, The Times will voluntarily trust-bust itself, thus contributing to the independence of American journalism.
I have to admit I was somewhat disappointed by the execution of these. They could have done a better job of mimicking the Times corrections style. Where’s the reference to specific (made up) articles? The final “It was blank, not blank” sentence? And why not throw in an Editors’ Note for good measure?
A man posing as a McCain campaign advisor managed to convince several media outlets to take him seriously. In the end, he’s a filmmaker looking for publicity. Take it away, New York Times:
It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.
Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.
Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.
And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.
Now a pair of obscure filmmakers say they created Martin Eisenstadt to help them pitch a TV show based on the character. But under the circumstances, why should anyone believe a word they say?
“That’s a really good question,” one of the two, Eitan Gorlin, said with a laugh . . .
They say the blame lies not with them but with shoddiness in the traditional news media and especially the blogosphere.
“With the 24-hour news cycle they rush into anything they can find,” said Mr. Mirvish, 40.
Mr. Gorlin, 39, argued that Eisenstadt was no more of a joke than half the bloggers or political commentators on the Internet or television.
An MSNBC spokesman, Jeremy Gaines, explained the network’s misstep by saying someone in the newsroom received the Palin item in an e-mail message from a colleague and assumed it had been checked out. “It had not been vetted,” he said. “It should not have made air.”
But most of Eisenstadt’s victims have been bloggers, a reflection of the sloppy speed at which any tidbit, no matter how specious, can bounce around the Internet. And they fell for the fake material despite ample warnings online about Eisenstadt, including the work of one blogger who spent months chasing the illusion around cyberspace, trying to debunk it.
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 Union.
The news arrived at a precarious time for the newspapers — around 2 a.m. Even the night editors had left, forcing a skeleton crew to decide whether to rush something into the paper, or risk being scooped. Two papers took the bait on what soon was exposed as a hoax.
But the news also came at a precarious time for the country: a conscription would have meant the Union army was in trouble, and the price of gold soon shot up. Two journalists from Brooklyn hatched the plan, knowing how best to sneak bogus news into print, and remembering to buy gold beforehand. (They were soon caught.)
Markets exist to convert good information into profitable investments. And, in their deep agnosticism, they also exist to allow false information to create quick profits. During that brief window, false information may in fact be easier to exploit — it shows up just in time, and purports to answer the questions on everyone’s mind.
And while the Civil War-era hoax had to use crude tools (war is going badly, gold rises in the face of bad news), Internet-fueled falsehoods and day-trading sites allow for highly tailored rumors to be quickly amplified and exploited.
In recent days there has been a range of false reports that managed to gain great purchase across the globe while the truth is still logging on.
Early in the month, Apple stock fell as much as 5 percent after a CNN-sponsored citizen-journalism site, ireport.com, published a false item from a user reporting that Steve Jobs, the company’s chief executive whose health has been a public preoccupation, had been rushed to the emergency room. The poster is still a mystery, though the Securities and Exchange Committee is investigating and CNN is cooperating.
In September, United Airlines lost more than $1 billion in market capitalization when traders treated a six-year-old announcement of a bankruptcy as a new development … Link
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 of the column was based was a hoax. We apologise for its use. Link
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 to play Play Station (awww!).
It was, according to its author, an experiment in linkbaiting…
Proving that the mainstream media are just as prone to hoaxing as the rest of us, London’s favourite paper-based tube-seat cover Metro was duped, as was it’s pay-per-use competitor The Sun, and The Telegraph (now erased from the Telegraph’s archives AND not in the Internet Archive either – tut).
Wired failed to get an official response from Google in regard to what (if any) action they might take on publishers who exploit ‘linkbaiting’ in the form of hoaxing – (it’s not there now – did anyone spot the story in Google News at all?).
Some have rightly pointed out though that Google is hardly in a position to dish out punishment to sites who dabble in linkbaiting in any case, given their own history of hoaxing – see Google Tisp and (something the MSM are not averse to either)…
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 week to reveal its fatal flaws.
Clearly, something went terribly wrong at the paper, and those involved have apologized:
Reporter Chuck Philips and his supervisor, Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin, issued statements of apology Wednesday afternoon. The statements came after The Times took withering criticism for the Shakur article, which appeared on latimes.com last week and two days later in the paper’s Calendar section…
“In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job,” Philips said in a statement Wednesday. “I’m sorry.”
In his statement, Duvoisin added: “We should not have let ourselves be fooled. That we were is as much my fault as Chuck’s. I deeply regret that we let our readers down.”
Times Editor Russ Stanton announced that the newspaper would launch an internal review of the documents and the reporting surrounding the story. Stanton said he took the criticisms of the March 17 report “very seriously.”
“We published this story with the sincere belief that the documents were genuine, but our good intentions are beside the point,” Stanton said in a statement.
“The bottom line is that the documents we relied on should not have been used. We apologize both to our readers and to those referenced in the documents and, as a result, in the story. We are continuing to investigate this matter and will fulfill our journalistic responsibility for critical self-examination.”
Some critics are surprised by the paper’s inability to instantly determine what went wrong. But it would be more surprising if the Times could suddenly point to one fatal flaw. That would mean the paper didn’t have the necessary faith in the documents required to publish a potentially defamatory story. It would mean they published with doubts in their minds. Clearly, the Times believed it had the goods. Perhaps more importantly, it wanted to have the goods. Like Dan Rather wanted to have the goods on President George Bush’s National Guard record.
In the end, the Times staffers involved were satisfied that the purported FBI documents were legitimate. This was likely the result of a process during which they tried to check themselves (”What if we’re wrong?”). But they also had a desire to not have wasted their time (”What if we’re right?!”). They wanted the documents, the scoop, to be real. This form of confirmation bias is the bane of every journalist, and a boon to unreliable sources and hoaxsters. They know we want it; it’s just a matter of setting the right trap.
Everything that comes after the moment of mental confirmation will only serve to further confirm the accepted truth. It’s easy to make things fit a point of view once you’ve convinced yourself that it’s accurate.
I’m sure Philips and Duvoisin are shocked at how wrong the story was. Assuming the paper does a proper examination, they’ll probably see a pattern emerge: an assemblage of assumptions, confirmation bias, and misinterpretations mixed with, I’m guessing, a little bit of bad luck and unintentional sloppiness thrown in for good measure.
In hindsight, some mistakes will seem obvious. Maybe people will deem them to be stupid mistakes. Hopefully, these mistakes, stupid and otherwise, will serve to inform new policies and procedures. Moving on without addressing them only guarantees repetition.
This incident is an interesting contrast. At some point along the way, the Times decided: this looks legit. Then The Smoking Gun looked at the same set of facts and documents and said: this looks bogus.
It was a binary problem and TSG solved it.
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,’ ” according to TechCrunch. Many French papers, among other media outlets, ran with the story. From TechCrunch:
…the infernal spiral fired up and very serious TV channels and traditional media covered the story one after the other: TF1, LePoint, L’express, FranceInter, Le Parisien, …They all mentioned the story as if this was real…
Arash is suddenly becoming a star in France, gets his page in Wikipedia… and is invited to talk about his presidency and his program for a few days; public opinion is with him. The guy talks well, has some political track record and finally sounds credible.
Of course Facebook has nothing to do with this, but nevertheless in some interviews Arash implies that he has a project with UNESCO and some backup from Facebook; he even declares that he has the power to reach, via a secret Facebook feature, close to a hundred million users, more than the French President himself. No one balks. Everyone buys it although this is really easy to fact check that Facebook does not have close to a hundred million users and even easier to validate the reality of this story with Facebook’s press department. Arash is actually nothing else than the president of FakeBook.
Here’s a follow-up corrective article from Le Parisien. Though my French isn’t exactly excellent, the story appears to adopt a playful tone. Of course, Derambarsh doesn’t help his situation by being rather indignant when questioned by the paper. (He appears to be quoted saying, “Did I kill anyone? Did I rob anyone?”) L’Express also appended a corrective passage to its original article. And here’s the incorrect offering from Le Figaro. TechCrunch reveals how the truth came to light:
But Facebook users are not fools and a group arises, denouncing the whole thing. ZDnet France spots the hoax, bloggers follow up quickly and the truth comes to light. According to the inquiry made by ArretsurImages many journalists covered the news just because others did and because the “President” looked credible. And then finally a wave of new articles came back to the story explaining this was a fake and that Arash misunderstood the purpose of this election. Of course this is too late and the French press has been fooled all the way.
Many tried to reach Arash for more details and reactions but without success. Did he do this out of pure calculation or was his ego responsible for the whole story? The most important point: A simple user managed to generate the biggest prank in the history of Facebook and the press bought it. Hilarious, ridiculous, but also worrying and sad for the French press (a big chunk of it) whose credibility has been hit hard.
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
On Oct. 29, we reported on the death of Chuck Biscuits, the former D.O.A. and Danzig drummer, which turned out to be a hoax. The B.C.-born drummer’s brother confirmed a day later that Biscuits, whose real name is Charles Montgomery, is healthy and living in Seattle. 
