Slashdot Mirror
Iran's News Agency Picks Up Onion Story
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.'"
What's next? They're gonna steal fox news stories?
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...
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.
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. ;)
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
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.
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.
...this bat, it viciously defends the Americans and has billions of dollars, so it will obviously help the Israelis too.
..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?"
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,
Revolutionary Guard: "You know, Ahmy,
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
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.
Careful, that sounded dangerously close to not jumping on the bandwagon.
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
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 :).
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/.
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.