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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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! Report an error
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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,’ [...]
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 Report an error
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 [...]
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, [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
