The Onion, America’s Finest News Source and easily one of the best destinations for quality satire if we ever visited one, strikes yet again. Not only is it wiping the floor with real journalism on Google News Spotlight – a new section dedicated to in-depth journalism work – but it is also lovingly feeding the dinosaurs satirical stories that wind up getting reported as actual news.
Two Bangladeshi newspapers, The Daily Manab Zamin and New Nation, have been forced to apologize to the public today after having regurgitated a news article taken from The Onion website which claimed the Moon landings were faked.
The fake news article in question said Neil Armstrong had told a news conference he had been “forced to reconsider every single detail of the monumental journey after watching a few persuasive YouTube videos and reading several blog posts” by a conspiracy theorist.
From the BBC:
The Daily Manab Zamin said US astronaut Neil Armstrong had shocked a news conference by saying he now knew it had been an “elaborate hoax”.
Neither they nor the New Nation, which later picked up the story, realised the Onion was not a genuine news site. Both have now apologised to their readers for not checking the story.
“We thought it was true so we printed it without checking,” associate editor Hasanuzzuman Khan told the AFP news agency. “We didn’t know the Onion was not a real news site.”
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Solid gold, and this quote from the tabloid newspaper’s associate editor fake news article truly puts the icing on top of the cake:
“I suppose it really was one small step for man, one giant lie for mankind.”
Keep on doing what you’re doing, The Onion. We love you.
(Via @minorissues)
