Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the Russian government struggled to mend its ailing economy, but the nation's financial situation remained dire. In November 1991, Forbes FYI, an American business magazine, revealed just how hopeless the Russian economic situation had become. It reported that the Russian government, desperate for foreign currency, had decided to sell the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin to the highest bidder. The body had been on public display in a Red Square mausoleum for decades. The bidding would start at $15 million.

ABC News and USA Today both repeated the story. Subsequently the editor of Forbes FYI revealed that it was a hoax. Russian Interior Minister Viktor Barrannikov denounced the joke as "an impudent lie."

In July 2001 an e-mail began to circulate claiming that the Lovenstein Institute, a think-tank based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, had conducted research into the IQ of all the Presidents of the past 50 years and had concluded that George W. Bush ranked at the bottom, with an IQ of only 91. (Click here to read the text of the email.)

The claim that G.W. Bush had the lowest IQ of any recent U.S. President attracted the attention of the international media. The London Guardian broke the story on July 19, and on August 26 Garry Trudeau featured the report in his Doonesbury comic strip. Unfortunately both Trudeau and the Guardian had fallen for a hoax. More→

A chart that circulated online during the first months of 2004 purported to show that American states whose populations possess higher average incomes and higher average IQs voted for Gore in the 2000 Presidential elections. Their poorer, lower-IQ counterparts voted for Bush. The implication was that smart people vote Democratic, and stupid people vote Republican. Major newspapers and magazines, including the St. Petersburg Times and the Economist, printed the chart before it was exposed as a hoax. More→

On 8 September 2004, Dan Rather reported on 60 Minutes that CBS had obtained documents revealing that President Bush had disobeyed orders while serving in the National Guard and had then used his family's influence to cover up his poor service record. The documents allegedly came from the files of Col. Killian, Bush's commanding officer in the Guard. Rather's news report generated controversy almost immediately. Bloggers pointed out that the documents in question looked as if they had been written in Microsoft Word, which would not have existed when Bush was serving in the Guard. Initially CBS paid no attention to the bloggers, but when it realized that its source for the documents, Bill Burkett, had lied about how he obtained them, it decided that it could no longer vouch for their authenticity. Rather apologized for airing the story.

In 2006, on a Belgian TV station news broadcast, it was announced that Flanders, the Dutch-speaking half of the country, had seceded from the country. Thirty minutes into the news bulletin,only after the station''s phonelines were swamped, it was revealed to be a "War of the Worlds"-style hoax. More→