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Iran's News Agency Picks Up Onion Story

Posted by timothy on from the makes-them-cry dept.

J053 writes "FARS, the Iranian news agency, ran a story about a Gallup poll which showed that 'the overwhelming majority of rural white Americans said they would rather vote for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than U.S. president Barack Obama.' '"I like him better," said West Virginia resident Dale Swiderski, who, along with 77 percent of rural Caucasian voters, confirmed he would much rather go to a baseball game or have a beer with Ahmadinejad.' Only problem was, it was a story from The Onion. Not only that, they took credit for it! The Onion responded by stating that 'Fars is a subsidiary and has been our Middle Eastern bureau since the mid 1980s.'"

29 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. What's next? by unix_core · · Score: 5, Funny

    What's next? They're gonna steal fox news stories?

    1. Re:What's next? by Stephan+Schulz · · Score: 4, Funny

      What's next? They're gonna steal fox news stories?

      Come on! Even a senile pygmy macaque can tell that Fox is all satire.

      --

      Stephan

    2. Re:What's next? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Seriously, several friends of mine from the UK actually thought Fox News was satire. They thought Fox and the Colbert Report were basically the same thing.

    3. Re:What's next? by MysteriousPreacher · · Score: 5, Insightful

      A lot of what happens in the U.S. appears to be satire. I along with a lot of people got taken in by the Romney airplane window thing. We've heard so many odd things from senior politicians and candidates that it's really not easy to discern the poes from the nutters. The U.S. has elected officials wasting time trying to push creationism in to the science class, obsession with abstinence only education, and this odd idea that universal health care is synonymous with Bolshevism.

      Not saying we're perfect though. We have homeopathy and other crazy shit coming out of our earholes. We have vaccine denialism, denial of climate change, people who function daily in a modern society while still believing that an invisible guy in the sky is listening to their heaven-sent words, and organic/natural products being fetishised.

      We have a Daily Mail led army of middle aged white guys, simultaneously angry and despondent, because immigrants and queers are giving their houses cancer. Had a discussion the other night with a long-term Daily Mail reader, and it was a Gish gallop of nonsense and generalisations. Not a good sign when someone hurls vitriol at a group called "them", without taking the time to clarify membership of this group (i.e. "pakis"), it's pretty clear that the Mail is strong in them. Fun fact: The reason why crime is running out of control in the UK (despite statistics showing a long trend of decline), is that police recruitment is focussing too much on gays and women, and should instead only have tall straight men (presumably white) on the beat.

      A lot of this stuff doesn't really surface in public debate. A politician in the UK claiming that pregnancy resulting from rape probably isn't legitimate rape would be retiring to spend time with the family. The UK is generally secular, and religion tends to be more a personal and understated thing, so a politician pushing to have Jewish myths taught as science would largely be dismissed as some kind of nutter. In the U.S. there seems to be more support available for the extreme views. I'm writing as an outside, so do please correct me if I'm wrong here.

      --
      -- Using the preview button since 2005
    4. Re:What's next? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Informative

      At least the Onion is satire. The Sun (UK) printed a made up story about Japanese women being sold lambs made to look like poodles and wondering why they wouldn't eat dog food. Several other papers around the world picked it up and even the BBC repeated it.

      --
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      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    5. Re:What's next? by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Actually, it is true that many people take Steven Colbert and John Stewart more seriously since they are true comedians, who know that the best humor has a significant element of truth in it. You can watch it and see where the humor is while still getting real news. You can't really say the same about Fox.

      --
      Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
    6. Re:What's next? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Polls show those who watch John Stewart and Stephen Colbert are more properly and successfully informed than those who watch the rest of this political hocome. I myself enjoy a laugh or two while realizing we're all fucked.

    7. Re:What's next? by jc42 · · Score: 2

      One of the things I like about Judaeism is the culture of examination of the texts. Kind of amusing though how they seem to spend a great deal of time finding loopholes.

      This can work both ways. One of the more fun parts of the biblical dietary rules is that, while it's forbidden in general to eat invertebrates, there is a specific "loophole" listed in two places that allows eating Orthoptera (grasshoppers, locusts, etc.). What you do is ask someone who believes in such things whether they eat shrimp or crayfish or lobster. If they say they do, you ask if they eat grasshoppers or locusts or katydids. They'll probably look at you in disgust, and say "Of course not."

      You then point out that they've violated biblical rules on both counts. This gives you ground to ridicule whatever other supposed biblical laws they may have been supporting. If they can't even get simple things like "shrimp forbidden; grasshoppers allowed" right, how credible can they be on anything else?

      (Meanwhile, nutritionists have pointed out that insects are not just edible, but are a good source of easily-digested proteins. Humans don't eat them much, but this is probably mostly because they're rather small, and we're top-level predators adapted to catching much bigger game.)

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
  2. For sure! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    They are trying to be the most reliable news source in Iran, after all.

    [end sarcasm]

    1. Re:For sure! by SpzToid · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Most reliable? If you're talking about Fox News, I think you are referring to the 'fair and balanced' coverage Fox News frequently advertises. Fox isn't claiming to be any more 'reliable' for reporting news than FARS is claiming to be doing in Iran. (and If you want 'breaking news' try TMZ). If Fox were so serious about actually reporting news, they wouldn't fill all their prime-time, most-profitable hours with pundit shock-jocks like Bill O'Reilly, or Glen Beck.

      Know your trademarks. Or psuedo-trademarks, or whatever. Better yet, try to understand the media industry that claims to be reporting news.

      --
      You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
    2. Re:For sure! by amck · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Most reliable? If you're talking about Fox News, I think you are referring to the 'fair and balanced' coverage Fox News frequently advertises. Fox isn't claiming to be any more 'reliable' for reporting news

      If Fox News was reliably bad, you could simply take their headlines and invert them to find out the truth. In order to be completely useless it actually has to get things right occasionally.

      --
      Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
    3. Re:For sure! by QQBoss · · Score: 5, Informative

      Errr, Glenn Beck hasn't worked for Fox News in over a year.

      I live in China, don't watch Fox News (or any other American television channels), and even I am aware that Fox/NBC/CBS/ABC don't run straight news shows during prime time- they run them between 5 and 7 pm or 10 and 11:30 or so, depending on the time zone, because running news during their most profitable hours would put them out of business. So why is Fox News unserious for running commentary at the times when they can maximize profits with other programs just as their competitors do with Monday Night Football, Law & Order, The Simpsons, etc...?

      Oh, wait, I misunderstand, you are comparing Fox News to MSNBC and CNN who run hard news with no shock-jocks during their prime time schedules like Hardball with Chris Matthews, The Rachel Maddow Show, PoliticsNation with Al Sharpton, Anderson Cooper 360, and Piers Morgan Tonight(*). Oh... wait... now I get it, you are saying that there is no serious news reported in the USA except for CNN Headline News! That's the ticket!

      * I had to actually search for all those TV show names, if some of them aren't on the air anymore, my bad.

    4. Re:For sure! by Loosifur · · Score: 4, Funny

      Careful, that sounded dangerously close to not jumping on the bandwagon.

      --
      This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
    5. Re:For sure! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Few here will believe you. They're so biased against FoxNews (though few have actually watched it), that anything said in FoxNews' favor just flies over their little adolescent heads. They'd rather get their news from Jon Stewart (or worse, MTV).

      People who get their news from the Daily Show are better informed than those who watch Fox News: http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2012/confirmed/.

    6. Re:For sure! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      After a new hours of Fox News i prefer jumping in front of the bandwagon...

    7. Re:For sure! by jc42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The trouble is that most people mix up which of those two examples is doing the news and which is doing the "making shit up".

      Yeah, an part of the fun is that both Fox and the Onion carefully maintain a public "face" as a serious news agency. OTOH, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert both repeatedly point out that they are professional comedians who work for Comedy Central. Part of their status of comedians is from stories like this one, in which people take their stories as fact despite their repeated disclaimers that they're comedians, not reporters. The Onion's and Fox's stories are also mistaken as straight news, although they have always been pure satire. There is a strong suspicion that the people at Fox aren't aware that they're writing satire. The people at The Onion are very conscious of this, and some of them have commented that the most difficult part of writing satire is that the Real World keeps producing extreme events that they wouldn't dared have written as satire.

      Disclaimer: I have family ties to The Onion. My daughter was a staff reporter/photographer for them while she was a college student in Madison, and has lots of fun stories about the gang's inner workings. One of their favorite signs of "success" was someone repeating a story of theirs as fact. It seems they often do "fact checking", to verify that what they've written hasn't actually happened. I don't know whether they treat the folks at Fox as colleagues or subject matter. Maybe we should ask them. But they might take such a question as an opportunity for more satire. And on the third hand, if they say that they have friends working at Fox as satirical writers, we should probably assume that they've fact-checked and found it to be untrue, so it's proper "professional conduct" for them to report it as fact.

      There's a lot of slippery logic involved in satire ...

      Of course, you're right, the other stations are doing it too... and it's all terrible. That's why I get my news from Slashdot :|

      And you're probably correct to do so. As with the Daily Show, the Colbert Report and The Onion, Slashdot can be taken as a good source of interesting news stories. You can then google them and find a number of sources that report the actual stories with various slants. This may well be why the pollsters have found that the people who follow Stewart and Colbert are among the best-informed voters. I wouldn't be surprised if a poll showed that /. readers are among the best-informed in tech subjects, but I wouldn't infer that it's because they get their information here. Everyone here knows about google, right? Right? Hmmm ....

      Another similar source of good news stories/tipoffs is NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" program (which I'm right now hearing on the radio). They're basically a comedy show based on real news, but part of what they do it tell made-up stories, and challenge people to distinguish them from true stories. They've also had the fun of hearing their fake news stories repeated as fact. I don't think the pollsters have included them in their poll questions, but it wouldn't be surprising if their listeners would come up as among the best-informed. Their humor is similar to the Stewart/Colbert/Onion approach to news, though in a slightly different format, and they're likely to attract an audience that knows enough to appreciate their very topical humor.

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
  3. Some background by mabedan · · Score: 5, Informative

    Fars news is owned by Iran's revolutionaty Guard, and is Iranian government's biggest propaganda tool. This website was among the many other government driven sources which anounced Ahmadinejad's "victory" 3 hours before the polls were over...

    1. Re:Some background by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      anounced Ahmadinejad's "victory" 3 hours before the polls were over...

      So it is similar to our fox news?

    2. Re:Some background by unix_core · · Score: 5, Funny

      Oh, I thought it was one of those non-propaganda Iranian news agencies ;)

    3. Re:Some background by mabedan · · Score: 2

      As a matter of fact, iranian press is not doing as bad as you might imagine. It's true that after Mr Khatami's presidency (iranian reformist), situation has gotten somewhat worse, but press has a relative freedom. They can't go all the way to criticise the supreme leader, but criticising the president, parlement, and countries politics is not a novelty.

  4. FARS didn't give credit by blind+biker · · Score: 2

    The agency in question is the Iranian state-controlled FARS news agency. What bothers me in this event is that FARS didn't mention the source of their (mis)information.

    --
    "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
  5. Re:News for nerds... by HairyNevus · · Score: 4, Funny

    Something about an online news source, falling for a dupe. Seemed relevant to /. as a whole.

    --
    You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
  6. The onion that will change the world by G3ckoG33k · · Score: 4, Informative

    It is good to see how onions can change the world.

    BBC has this story about the onion story http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/19620411

    Peter Glazebrook talking about his amazing onion: 'I should think it could feed a thousand people. It would certainly do for a lot of hotdogs.'

    It is good to see how onions can change the world, even Iran. ;)

  7. Funny, but not the way you might think by 3seas · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As the world awakes to the games of the few... Hopefully this backfires in the way of enforcing the reality that the majority of the people on this planet are more alike than they are with the few in positions of command and control. When enough realize this, to few will participate in fabricated, expensive and damaging warfare. Adn we all know there are those few who thrive on what is not beneficial to the rest of us.

  8. Insha'Allah? by Penurious+Penguin · · Score: 4, Funny

    Someday, they may be fooled by something far more absurd than The Onion, like CNN -- leaving their whole nation careening stupidly in everlasting confusion. In regards to FOX, I think we've been duped ourselves, mistaking a Persian onion for a crystal ball.

    Revolutionary Guard: "Sir, we must expand our nuclear capabilities and wipe Israel off the map.

    Ahmadinejad: "It's laminated you imbecile."

    Revolutionary Guard: "Good point. About that uranium, sir."

    Ahmadinejad: "Look, I'm sick of all this primitive uranium shit. The Americans have a giant bat named Bruce. Our uranium can't make bats that large. There's just no way. This, ...this bat, it viciously defends the Americans and has billions of dollars, so it will obviously help the Israelis too.

    Revolutionary Guard: "You know, Ahmy, ..ever since we watched that Sam Bacile film together, I've been having doubts about this whole radical thing. Don't you ever think of just leaving this all behind and moving to Moldova?"

    Ahmadinejad: "I've thought of it many times, but they speak Moldovan, and I really have great difficulty with it. I'm thinking more along the lines of Kalmykia. They have a great chess club there, and the Americans don't even know about it. Plus, Putin might be more inclined to visit us on holidays."

    Revolutionary Guard: "A giant bat?"

    --
    Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
  9. FARS you say? by officialkirill · · Score: 2

    Eeh, seems more like a FARCE

  10. The Onion is having fun with credit though by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They have added a link saying "For more on this story: Please visit our Iranian subsidiary organization, Fars." with a link so a screen cap of the story on Fars.

    I always love it when a real news organization gets punked by the Onion :).

  11. Re:News for nerds... by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 2

    Because there is a section called politics. Also, the story is about political propaganda via technology gone horribly wrong, and the Onion is a website, which as it turns out also involves technology. The better question is why did you think it was important enough to read and comment on, but then complain because you thought that it should be in the idle section?

    --
    Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
  12. Happens elsewhere ... by kbahey · · Score: 2

    The largest Egyptian state owned newspaper, Al Ahram, published a spoof Kissinger quote as genuine.

    Of course, it plays to the sentiments of some about the revolutions of the Arab Spring are really a foreign conspiracy for chaos and wars, yadda yadda.

    They did not even apologize for it ...

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