Hoax Museum Blog: Journalism

New Zealand Rapper MC Emu — On the Fighting Talk weblog journalism student Patrick Crewdson gives an example of how hoaxes can make the leap from being fiction into becoming fact. He once edited a journal called Critic that published a joke article about "New Zealand's least-known musician": rapper MC Emu. Of course, MC Emu was fictitious, but now references to this rapper have begun to appear in serious histories of New Zealand music... references that seem to credit MC Emu with being a real character.
Posted: Tue Apr 13, 2004.   Comments (1)

Stories that sound like jokes, but aren’t — Every year on April 1 reporters test our wits by mixing in a few joke stories with the real ones. But then there are also the stories that are real, but sound like jokes. These stories challenge us to keep our skepticism under control. This year, the biggest example of that was Google's Gmail announcement that had many people swearing it must be a joke. Then we also had an article released by the British National Archives describing a bizarre WWII plan to place chickens inside of nuclear bombs (to keep the bombs warm). Apparently true. Finally, there's this story about Canadian plans to annex a group of Caribbean islands, thereby transforming Canada into an expansionist, imperialist power. This reminded me of the Canadian World Domination site, which is now unfortunately defunct.
Posted: Fri Apr 02, 2004.   Comments (3)

Glass and Blair: Together At Last — image Christopher Frizzelle of The Stranger managed to get a real scoop. He convinced both Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass to sit down and talk with him simultaneously, so that they could compare notes on their careers as rogue journalists. Unfortunately, this dream interview never occurred. The Stranger later published a tongue-in-cheek retraction. And Stephen Glass himself denied that the interview took place. Still, Karl Freske (whom I have to thank for providing me with a heads-up about the story) has an interesting theory. He speculates that "it's just possible that the interview is real and that the 'hoax declaration' is the hoax. Less likely, but well within the Stranger's sense of humor."
Posted: Mon Mar 29, 2004.   Comments (0)

Panama City, 1989. NBC Phone Hoax — In December 1989 the U.S. invaded Panama. NBC News managed to obtain a live interview with an American businessman staying in Panama City, Roger Sizemore, who said he was witnessing the invasion as it happened. But ever since then questions have persisted about who Sizemore really was. After the interview 'Roger Sizemore' disappeared without a trace, never to be found again. Then a man named Brian Seifert came forward claiming that he was the man on the phone pretending to be Sizemore, and that he hadn't been in Panama City. He had phoned from a basement in a suburb of Indianapolis. Seifert says NBC put him up to it. NBC says they were the ones who were hoaxed... if there was indeed a hoax at all. Voice analysis shows that the voices of Sizemore and Seifert do match, which lends credence to Seifert's story. But Seifert is a strange character. In 2002 he was indicted by the FBI on suspicion of filing a false terrorist complaint. So he isn't the most upright character. But on the other hand, everything he's said about the 1989 phone hoax has checked out, so far. If true, it's surprising that this hoax hasn't received more coverage.
Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2004.   Comments (1)


Fake Reporters — The Bush administration is getting some flack for a video it has distributed to news stations showing journalists commenting on the public reaction to the newly passed Medicare law. The problem is that those aren't real journalists. They're actors paid to read from a script. It's a subtle, ambiguous form of deception, since the White House can always say that they really are reporters. After all, they're standing there, in front of a camera, reporting. Doesn't that make them a real reporter? In a sense, yes. But really, no. They're White House press agents. There's still a difference between a press agent and a reporter.
Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2004.   Comments (2)

Reporter in Trouble — Another journalist is in trouble for possible plagiarism and creating hoax stories. This time it's Jack Kelley of USA Today.
Posted: Wed Jan 14, 2004.   Comments (0)

The Indian Rope Trick — rope trickA new book by Peter Lamont chronicles the history of the Indian rope trick. According to him the trick is a hoax, not just in the sense that it's an illusion. Rather, in the sense that the trick never existed. It was never performed. In fact, it began its life in 1890 as the fictional creation of a Chicago reporter. The book is reviewed by The Guardian.
Posted: Wed Jan 14, 2004.   Comments (1)

Stu Magazine — Bob Pagani (aka the cranky media guy) gave me a heads up about a recent Canadian media hoax. It was the launch of Stu, a new 'lad' magazine in the style of Maxim. Stu was the magazine 'for the adequate man.' Articles included advice on how to score with hot-girl's less-than-hot friends, as well as how to find great free merchandise by dumpster diving. The new magazine managed to get quite a bit of press coverage, even though, as it turned out, there was no Stu magazine. Only a press kit.
Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2003.   Comments (0)

Mickey Mouse Goes to University — A British reporter filled out a university application with info for Mickey Mouse, and Mickey was accepted. But to be fair to the university, instead of using the name 'Mickey Mouse,' which would have been a giveaway, he wrote Michael Mouse. That sounds like it really could be someone's name.
Posted: Thu Sep 25, 2003.   Comments (0)

Of Foxes, Turtles, and Ham — fox A Japanese newspaper scooped its rivals by revealing a serious environmental problem—that foxes were eating the eggs of the endangered loggerhead sea turtle. It even had pictures of the foxes eating the eggs. Until it turned out that the only reason the foxes were standing there by the eggs was because the cameramen had lured them there with ham.
Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2003.   Comments (0)

Jayson Blair Redux — So Esquire has commissioned Jayson Blair to write a movie review of Shattered Glass, an upcoming movie about Stephen Glass (another media hoaxer from five years ago). I'm sure his review will, in turn, become one of the most heavily reviewed reviews ever.
Posted: Sat Jul 26, 2003.   Comments (0)

Missing Stories at New York Times — Last week everyone was linking to this spoof about the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction. It even managed to become the first item displayed if you typed in 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' on Google (though Google has since changed that). In the same spirit, here's a spoof page about Jayson Blair and the New York Times.
Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2003.   Comments (0)

Would you hire this man? — A British reporter manages to get a job guarding Serena Williams even though he submitted a fake CV with his application. No one bothered to check his references.
Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2003.   Comments (0)

Great Wall of China Hoax — This day in hoax history. June 25, 1899: The Great Wall of China Hoax.
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2003.   Comments (0)

Journalistic Integrity — Slate has an interesting piece about some journalists from the first half of the twentieth century who took serious liberties with the truth: H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling, and Joseph Mitchell.
Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2003.   Comments (0)

Beckham Kidnap Plot — The Observer details how the News of the World came to believe a far-fetched yarn about a plot to kidnap Victoria Beckham, even though their source was a serial liar.
Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2003.   Comments (0)

Epidemic of Lying — The San Francisco Chronicle argues that America is suffering from an epidemic of lying, as a consequence of which we're no longer shocked by scandals such as the Jayson Blair Affair. We just expect that everyone is lying.
Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2003.   Comments (0)

Reviewing Stephen Glass — Book critics are stressing out over how to respond to the release of Stephen Glass's first novel. Should they review it and trash it, or just ignore it? Stephen Glass, if you don't remember, got fired from the New Republic five years ago for inventing news.
Posted: Sat May 31, 2003.   Comments (0)

Posted: Tue Sep 17, 2002.   Comments (0)

US News & World Report and the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 — US News & World Report has a special double issue this week on "The Art of the Hoax". Check out the lead article, "Strange but true: This is the golden age of hoaxes." Yours truly was interviewed for it and gets mentioned twice! Very exciting. But also check out their short piece on the Great Moon Hoax of 1835. As it turns out, they fell for a tall-tale about this hoax. In the first paragraph they claim that because of this newspaper hoax:

"Daily sales of the Sun skyrocketed from 4,000 to 19,000–making it the world's most popular paper and launching a new kind of journalism."

Not so! For almost a century historians have been repeating this story about how the great moon hoax propelled the New York Sun to media stardom and established it as the world's most popular paper, and established modern journalism in the process. But the story is actually totally false. The tale got its start because a few days into the hoax, on August 28, 1835, the Sun boasted that it had a circulation of 19,360, making it the most widely circulated paper in the world. Almost a century later the historian Frank M. O'Brien, in his 1918 work about the history of the Sun (The Story of the Sun) made note of this boast in his retelling of the hoax. Subsequent historians, who relied solely upon O'Brien's work for their information about the hoax, figured that if the Sun was boasting about its circulation during the moon hoax, this must have meant that the hoax had caused a rapid rise in the paper's circulation. It seemed like a logical conclusion, but it was wrong.In actuality, the Sun had regularly been making the same boast about its high circulation for weeks before the moon hoax occurred. In fact, two weeks before the moon hoax, on August 13, 1835, the Sun boasted that its circulation was at 26,000, meaning that if you go by the Sun's own numbers, its circulation actually dropped during the moon hoax. But once the idea was established that the moon hoax immediately caused a meteoric rise in the Sun's circulation, it proved to be so compelling (because it provided a slightly scandalous angle to the birth of modern journalism) that no one ever bothered to check if it was actually true. In fact, various historians began to embellish the idea, inventing the claim that the Sun's previous circulation had been 4,000 (or 6,000, or 8,000... pick a number. Almost every author who writes about the moon hoax has a different figure for what the Sun's circulation skyrocketed from, though they all agree on the 19,000 figure).USN&WR also claims that the Journal of Commerce first exposed the hoax after the hoax's author, Richard Adams Locke, confessed to one of their reporters. This is also false. Many New York papers had immediately denounced the Sun's lunar claims as a hoax, and the New York Herald was the first to point the finger at Locke. The idea that the Journal of Commerce exposed the hoax dates to an 1852 retelling of the hoax by William Griggs.USN&WR can't really be blamed for getting some of the facts wrong. The literature about the moon hoax is full of these erroneous claims. The only reason I realized they were wrong is because I'm writing my dissertation about the moon hoax, and so I spent the time to actually dig up the papers from 1835 and find out what the real story was.
Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2002.   Comments (1)

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