“We’d do well to think before we post”: That’s the advice that the editors of the Columbia Journalism Review offer to bloggers in their March/April editorial. Matt Yglesias (of Atlantic fame) and Ann Friedman (of Feministing) would do well to heed it. Both bloggers appear to have been taken in by a cleverly-done April Fools’ prank. At first glance, this “New York Times” article about the Navy creating all-female crews for two submarines seems fairly believable. It mimics Times style fairly convincingly, and the page looks right. But the URL isn’t quite right, the “multimedia” links don’t work, and the “related stories” include several other April Fools’-related items. And that’s before you even get to the content of the story, which includes a photo of “Rev. Dusty Boats,” is written by “Seymor Conch and James Boswell,” and contains the requisite sentence about “mixing with seamen”. And then there’s this over-the-top “quote”:
I went to submarines to get a breather from my wife and her mother. Especially her mother. Now I have to spend 60 days underwater with women? You know how long they take in the bathroom.
Would anyone who actually thinks that way about his wife and mother-in-law tell it to the New York Times? The quote came at the end of the story; perhaps Ygelsias and Friedman, fine bloggers both, didn’t quite get there. Friedman has already acknowledged she was “belatedly gotten”. Is Yglesias trying to pull a fast one on his readers, or has he, too, been “got”?
