It pays to check your sources.

[JohnB]

On August 31, the Onion published an article where Neil Armstrong admitted that he was now convinced that the moon landing was a hoax.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/conspiracy_theorist_convinces_neil?utm_source=a-section

 

Chuckles all round at the silly conspiracy theorists.

 

Unfortunately two Bangladeshi papers didn't know that the "Onion" was not "a genuine news site" and printed the story as fact.

 

From the BBC report;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8237558.stm

 

"We thought it was true so we printed it without checking," associate editor Hasanuzzuman Khan told the AFP news agency.

 

"We didn't know the Onion was not a real news site."

 

You really couldn't make this stuff up, could you?

[The Bear's Key]

Ha, great way to teach newspapers to verify Another good one...

 

 

http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/2009/05/11/20090511ODDireland-wikipedia0511-ON.html

Student hoaxes world's media with fake quote

........

When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.

 

His report card:

Wikipedia passed.

Journalism flunked.

 

The sociology major's obituary-friendly quote - which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer's death March 28 - flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India. They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia twice caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it.

 

A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets they'd swallowed his baloney whole.

 

"I was really shocked at the results from the experiment," Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.

 

"I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up," he said. "It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."

Emphasis mine. Wikipedians caught and removed the false entry twice, nice

[padren]

On August 31, the Onion published an article where Neil Armstrong admitted that he was now convinced that the moon landing was a hoax.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/conspiracy_theorist_convinces_neil?utm_source=a-section

 

Are you trying to claim that The Onion, at the time their article was written, didn't have the resources and technology to write a 'real moon landing hoax article' and faked the whole thing? If you are suggesting the entire organization conspired to fake the whole thing you need to provide some proof for your assertion - this is a science forum after all - you may buy into the 'moon landing article hoax' hoax but I'm not ready to throw on a tinfoil hat just yet!

 

Sorry, couldn't resist