Amazon.com Widgets
About the Museum
The Museum of Hoaxes is dedicated to promoting knowledge about hoaxes. On our blog we post about dubious-sounding claims — and whatever else strikes our fancy. The site is also home to the Hoaxipedia, the museum's online encyclopedia of hoaxes. Other popular areas of the site include:

The Hoax Forum
Top 20 most bizarre experiments of all time
Top 100 April Fools' Day Hoaxes


Web Hoax Museum

Fake Al Sharpton Fools MSNBC
Status: News
Newsgroper is a parody site full of fake celebrity blogs. To make sure that no one confuses its content with real news, it posts the warning "Fake Parody Blogs, Political Humor, Celebrity Satire, Funny Commentary" in the title bar of every page.

Apparently, this warning wasn't enough for MSNBC's Alex Johnson. In a piece about Michael Vick, he quoted from Newsgroper's fake Al Sharpton blog, presenting the following quotation as if it were something Sharpton really had said:
"If the police caught Brett Favre (a white quarterback for the Green Bay Packers) running a dolphin-fighting ring out of his pool, where dolphins with spears attached to their foreheads fought each other, would they bust him? Of course not," Sharpton wrote Tuesday on his personal blog.

Caught in the blunder, MSNBC quickly removed the quotation from the article and posted this correction:

image

To me, the self-serving correction is worse than the original mistake. The fake Al Sharpton blog isn't a hoax. A hoax is a deliberate deception. Since the Al Sharpton blog announces right in the title bar that it's a parody blog, it hardly counts as a hoax.

MSNBC should retract their correction, and admit they're victims of sloppy reporting, not of a hoax. (Thanks to Cranky Media Guy for the link.)
Posted By: Alex | Date: Sun Aug 26, 2007 | Comments (6)
Category: Websites, Journalism, Sports