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MSNBC Reports Really, Really Fake News
MSNBC.com reported yesterday that Michael Vick's dogfighting case is dividing African American leaders into two camps—one that criticizes the quarterback's cruelty to animals, and another whose members think his persecution is driven by a racist agenda. Supposedly leading the latter is the Reverend Al Sharpton, who the news group quotes at length.
The problem, as Gawker and National Review Online have noted, is that not one word of the attribution came out of Sharpton's mouth. To the contrary, it came from News Groper [full disclosure: the associate editor was a fact-checker—can you feel the irony?—for Mother Jones], a website made up entirely of satirical celebrity blog entries. Sharpton can be pretty dramatic sometimes, but it's surprising that reporter Alex Johnson wasn't given any pause by the absurdity of the "quote":
"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. "They would get his autograph, commend him on his tightly spiraled forward passes, then bet on one of his dolphins."
MSNBC got hip to the error and, rather than apologize to its readers for astoundingly sloppy reporting, posted in a correction that it "has determined that the blog is a hoax." The correction doesn't mention what tipped the news organization's meticulous fact-checkers off: News Groper's logo, which is a hand moving toward two globes that look like giant balls, or maybe breasts; Al Sharpton sharing a blog site with Lindsay Lohan, George Bush, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; or the words "fake parody blogs" in the title bar of every page.
LMAO: http://www.dolphinfighting.com/
well not to sound like im horribly skeptical and paranoid...but isn't it convenient that this makes *blogging* look like the culprit, and not MSNBC?
when many news shows and celebrities knock blogs quite a bit? (heaven forbid people get their entertainment somewhere other than the TV!)
This racist thing is getting to be old hat.
Al Sharpton and J. Jackson are bigots and racist themselves to the extreme
Didn't take time to read the article, eh, Donald?
With all of the websites coming online, with so much growth happening on the Internet the last thing we need is more confusion.
Personally I would not have gotten that News Groper's logo was a spoof, or known the site was a spoof because of certain persons sharing the site. I never look at the title bar so I would have missed the clue there as well.
If a news organization missed that it was a fake then how many others miss that point as well? Even if it's one person that's too many. Misinformation even in a satirical situation should never be interpreted as true, we got enough problems.
For those who use fake websites all the time they know it's fake. As a way to avoid confusion I would appreciate News Groper making it more obvious that the stories are not true.
Oh, boy. Here we go...
If one weren't familiar with TV or print media--you know, like an aborigine, or an alien, or a six year-old--then it would be understandable if they were baffled and terrified to see the satirical news of SNL (that's Saturday Night Life, geezers) or The Onion.
Go ahead, settle in to your chair and prepare to orient yourself with the crazy new world of online satire.
Here's a good primer course for you:
Google: "define:satire"
That ought to set you on your way =)
Call it a hunch, but I think me and that guy are on the same level. If I were working for MSNBC I'd have done the same thing. Not for any journalistic 'integrity' compromised by sensationalism and incompetence, more as a disgruntled sabotage of a crappy, over-hyped, sensationalizing cable monster run by sleazeballs --kind of like the guy who kept drawing penises into Disney cartoons. You know, on purpose.
This is completely excellent.
I wonder how they would
classify Fox News, that
claims to be "fair and
balanced".
If Al Sharpton actually believes the things he writes then he is simply a Neanderthal.
This is not a racial issue. Black or White, get caught dog fighting you are soon to be crushed..
If riots break out at sentencing then Sahrlpton should be jaied for un-American activities.
Wake up people.