aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

More crack reporting from the traditional media

MSNBC, in a story on how the Vick case divides African-American leaders, quoted from Al Sharpton’s personal blog, “If the police caught Brett Favre (a white quarterback for the Green Bay Packers) running a dolphin-fighting unit out of his pool, where dolphins with spears attached to their foreheads fought each other, would they bust him? Of course not.”

Just one problem. The “personal blog” was in reality a parody site.

How did the reporter figure it out? Digby:

The editor of the site, terribly impressed with MSNBC’s investigative skills as you might imagine, wonders which one of these clues finally tipped them off:

1. The words “fake parody blogs” in the titlebar of every page of our site
2. Our logo
3. Al Sharpton blogging on the same site as Lindsay Lohan, George Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
4. Our about page http://www.newsgroper.com/about/
5. Al Sharpton referring to himself in his bio as an “Emancipation Proclamation enthusiast”

LATER: Joe Gandelman points out that the MSNBC correction was wrong; they were carelessly taken in by parody, not duped by a hoax:

rather than admit “we put that on the site without really checking the website source as a whole - sorry!” or “we made a mistake in not looking at the post a bit more carefully but mistakes do happen!” MSNBC’s website writer called it “hoax” which implies Newsgroper set up to trick people.