There are a lot of stories like that on Fox news, or more correctly Faux News) which has become the right wing tabloid of cable news. Anyone other than fact-averse conservatives recognize that Fox nuisance doesn't fact check or multi-source; Murdoch media is propaganda, not reliable information.
Fake quotes are particularly effective in hoaxing.
But you should be able to rely on other media sources with better credentials to fact check, and most of all to multi-source, and to be more source savvy than EVER to rely on the Daily Mail for a story. Which makes the following all the more embarrassing for those media outlets that got caught red faced over this story, which they clearly failed to fact check or multi-source, which apparently MSNBC DID do........but only after initially running the story that showed up elsewhere over and over and over. Better late than never:
Story of vengeful jilted dentist WAS too good to be true
A hugely popular news story about a jilted dentist accused of pulling out all her ex-boyfriend's teeth has unraveled as a hoax.
News websites around the world ran the story last week about a woman in Poland named Anna Maćkowiak who took revenge on a man named Marek Olszewski when he turned up at her clinic complaining of toothache, days after dumping her for another woman.
Among the numerous U.S. news sites that picked up the story were Fox News, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, Yahoo! News, MSN, the New York Post, and The New York Daily News. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft, which operates MSN, and Comcast.)
The story even included quotes from the scorned dentist and her toothless ex.
"Lower Silesia Police Department has not been notified about such an event and is not investigating such a case," Pawel Petrykowski of the Provincial Police Headquarters in Wroclaw said in an email that was translated into English.
A legal adviser for Poland’s Chamber of Physicians and Dentists, which handles disciplinary matters, said the organization is not investigating and has never investigated any such case, and added that there is no dental practitioner named Anna Maćkowiak listed in Poland’s central register of dentists.
"No information about this kind of misconduct has been provided to the Supreme Chamber," the legal advisor, Marek Szewczyński, said in an email. "The Supreme Chamber is also not aware of any actions of this kind being taken by the Regional Chamber of Physicians and Dentists in Wroclaw, which would be the competent authority in case of a possible professional misconduct committed by a dental practitioner from Wroclaw."
Most online news outlets in Poland left the story alone.
Polish television news channel TVN4 published an article mocking foreign media's coverage of the story, which it speculates began as a prank. "It appears that the article, written as a joke, began life on the Internet and has little to do with any truth," the translated article reads.
All the news reports about Maćkowiak published on news websites in the U.S. and elsewhere, such as Australia’s Herald Sun or New Zealand Herald, can be traced back to an article published in the online edition of Britain's Daily Mail newspaper.
The article, which has been shared on Facebook more than 75,000 times since it was published on April 27, appears under the byline of staff reporter Simon Tomlinson.
But Tomlinson said he does not know where the story came from and distanced himself from it when questioned about its origins.
"I've drawn a bit of a blank," he said in an email. "The (Daily) Mail Foreign Service, which did the piece for the paper, is really just an umbrella term for copy put together from agencies. My news desk isn’t sure where exactly it came from."
Tabloids, and the internet --- you can't believe everything you read in either one. In this day and age of email, and relatively inexpensive long distance (and even international long distance) it is possible and desirable to be more skeptical and to check for yourself. To the extent that blogs function as media, or at least parallel to media, we have an obligation to fact check before misinforming people who treat sources as news reporting and news analysis. Too many people rely on sources which are fact averse - like Rush Limbaugh who comes to mind as just one example - and believe things they should not, form their opinions on things they should not, even vote on the basis of factually grossly inaccurate nonsense.
What I don't understand is how people are so easily able to suspend their disbelief the way they try to do while enjoying fiction, when they are clearly NOT indulging in works of fiction - tv, movies, books, games, etc. Do we no longer distinguish between entertainment and information?
Here is an earlier hoax story printed in the Daily Mail, one that I discovered on the blog Mikeb302000, when a commenter claimed that you couldn't buy more than one or two limes in the UK because of terrorism regulations. That story came from the right wing gun nut John Lott's blog, where it was run as fact, no questions about its authenticity or validity, no fact checking, no skepticism. Lott is notorious for not always having a close personal relationship himself with truth or fact, but in this case he appears to have been just plain hoaxed -------and his gun nut sycophants (or in some cases just psychos) blithely recirculated it as unquestioned fact from there, creating another urban myth on the right.
Here is that Daily Mail story, which you can still find on their web site btw, and no explanation for why this appeared under another by-line was ever provided. This time the classic quotes to give credibility are supplemented by a photo. The Daily Mail uses photo hoaxes often, notably the one with the Occupy Wall Street protester supposedly about to poop on a police car that was picked up by the right wing media and blogosphere. (My blogger friend Laci and I exposed that particular hoax with a phone call to the Brooklyn PD precinct where the police car was assigned.)
So here it is, a past fact free fraud from the Daily Mail - I'll follow it with the REAL story.:
You can't buy that lime... it could be classed as a weapon: Shock for chef shopping at Asda
'They vetted me and let me buy them. I clearly don't look like I'm going to carry out a drive-by fruiting any time soon'- Store to offer 'complimentary limes' as an apology
By Nadia Gilani
A chef was stunned to find she was almost banned
from buying two limes from a supermarket - because they could be classed as a
weapon.Marisa Zoccolan, 31, popped into the new Asda supermarket close to her home in Wallsend, North Tyneside, to pick up some groceries, including the citrus fruits.
But when she tried to pay for them at the self-service checkout, the message 'amount exceeded, authorisation required' flashed up.
Two limes? That's one too many: Marisa Zoccolan, pictured
with the two limes she was almost forbidden from buying
Marisa, a self-employed caterer said: 'I thought they were taking the pip, but the assistant told me the same applied to lemons.
Eventually staff at the supermarket allowed Marisa to buy
both limes
'But no, it's because they contain citric acid which could be squirted in someone's eyes. How ridiculous is that?'
Thankfully for Ms Zoccalan, who lives with partner Jacqui Nicholson, 37, and dog Doobie, the assistant allowed Marisa to eventually buy both of the fruits.
'Yes, they vetted me and let me buy them.
'I clearly don't look like I'm going to carry out a drive-by fruiting any time soon.
'If that citric acid rule applies to lemons and limes, it must apply to grapefruits as well.
'Maybe oranges are safer because they're less acidic?'
A spokeswoman for Asda said Ms Zoccalan would be offered some 'complimentary limes' as an apology.
'We know that sometimes health and safety rules can seem a bit plum crazy, but on this occasion it's a case of one of our colleagues indulging their sub-lime sense of humour,' she said.
'For some reason our tills are having trouble scanning multiple citrus fruits.
'We're working to fix the problem, but it seems our colleague tried to make
light of the issue.'
There was no story here; there was no 'vetting' of the customer to buy fruit. British anti-terrorism security does not authorize or otherwise empower their clerks and shelf-stockers to clear or not clear people; they are not the grocery store TSA. There was an entire story created out of a situation where a grocery store chain had problems with their self-check out registers not properly registering the number of fruit items, and instead defaulting to the number 2 but with the correct amount charged on the receipt tape. It was totally a 'non-story'.
That was it, it was a temporary grocery store receipt problem with number of items of fruit -- not specifically only citrus fruit either. It was a programming error that required a clerk to override the self-checkout register to generate a correct receipt. It didn't even require that, if the customer was not concerned about the number of fruit items appearing on the receipt.
But the Daily Mail did a full story on it, ran a headline, with quotes and photos. The part at the bottom that identifies that this was just a funny line tossed off by a check out clerk was added later, after a few other blogs and news media made fun by identifying this story was wrong.
But it is still there, on the Daily Mail web site archive. No corrections, no apology, clearly no fact checking by the Daily Mail. Only THIS story didn't get a lot of attention outside of the UK when it first ran, so unlike the story above by MSNBC, the right wing blogosphere didn't get caught with it as a hoax, fraud, fake. No REPUTABLE news source - or blogger - would run this crap as if it were true; no reputable news source or blogger should run anything from tabloids as if it were plausible without first using their head for something more than holding up their hats, and then should fact check and multi-source. It isn't hard, it isn't expensive; it just requires a minimum of critical thinking, and a few minutes effort.
And that is something we should ALL do, more often than it is done - far more often. Our world would be a better place with more skepticism, and less gullibility. In this case, shame on all the sources that carried the teeth-pulling story, and kudos, for better late than never MSNBC fact checking. I'm looking forward to seeing this story on the morning talking heads shows. Too bad that not everyone on the internet is as conscientious.
We need fewer sheep, or as the right likes to call their own, fewer 'sheeple'. We're in not only the information age, but the disinformation and misinformation age.
No comments:
Post a Comment