Odd this day
Twenty two years ago today, the sheriff’s department in Coldwater, Michigan, issued a statement warning people that Al-Qaeda was carrying out telemarketing fraud — only later discovering that their source was… perhaps not entirely to be relied upon.
They had, it turned out, found the story in “America’s Finest News Source”, The Onion, where it had appeared six days earlier.
To be fair to the Coldwater sheriff’s department, the whole point of The Onion is to keep a completely straight face while saying outlandish things which bear some relation to reality. Speaking a couple of years later, Carol Kolb, then Onion editor, described their approach:
If we’re doing our job right, we try to do it in a really straight, AP style. People aren’t used to seeing their humor without a punch line.
Rather wonderfully, she was speaking to a real journalist for a feature covering several separate examples of people falling for Onion stories and reproducing them as true. Because this one in Michigan was not the only instance.
There was, for example, the case of the Beijing Evening News announcing that Congress was threatening to leave Washington, D.C., “unless it got a new, modern Capitol building, complete with retractable roof”. Even better, the Chinese paper stood by the story, at least at first, “demanding proof it wasn’t true”, and eventually issuing a statement saying:
Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them with the aim of making money.
…to which Kolb responded:
That’s what we do at The Onion. We do print lies to make money.
MSNBC also once stated that
more than half of all exercise done in the United States happens in TV infomercials for workout machines.
The journalist responsible for that one “did not return a call seeking comment”.
In the 2002 case, a local detective, Dan Nichols, had issued his statement from the sheriff’s office with the simple, honest aim of trying to protect people from scammers. They had been hearing of more and more cases of older people robbed over the phone by wrong ’uns, and wanted to do something about it.
I was working on several telemarketing scams that were going on here with our elderly. In researching this, I came across this story. I didn’t have a source on the story. I hadn’t heard of The Onion. It appeared to me to be a legitimate news story, so I passed (it) along.
The Onion story ‘quoted’ George Tenet, director of the CIA, saying
We had known about al-Qaida’s practice of raising money through drug trafficking and money laundering, but it seems the full scope of their depravity had barely been imagined
…which would have been a clue, had it not appeared in a country where chiefs of law enforcement agencies making statements designed to resonate in a… masculine way is not unheard of. Poor Dan sent out his press release announcing that scams were
…going on throughout the United States, and some of these telemarketing programs are believed to be operated by al-Qaida. The CIA has announced that they acquired a videotape showing al-Qaida members making phone solicitations for vacation home rentals, long-distance telephone service, magazine subscriptions and other products.
But perhaps he shouldn’t have been facing questions as much as the town’s media, given that
the release was written up in the local paper and hit the national wires
…causing the sheriff’s office to be “bombarded with phone calls about the story”. Dan later said
It felt like I’d been had.
Without wishing to be too critical, Dan, there was a pretty good reason for that. He took it on the chin, though, and gave a statement to Wired when they covered it, saying
I was just kind of ticked off at myself for not verifying it before I passed it along, and not making sure it was satire. I have no problem with satire. I enjoy a good joke. I just hate it when it’s on me.
The article also quotes Chris Taylor, then “San Francisco bureau chief for Time magazine, and a longtime Onion fan”, saying
Average readers do themselves no disservice if they’re skeptical about every news story they read — fake or not.
So, perhaps we should examine my source for the date this happened: Sam Jordison’s Annus Horribilis.
It’s a very entertaining and informative source, but it does contain a disclaimer at the front:
…I should also probably admit here that not all the dates are absolutely 100 per cent certain…
However, the Onion story appeared on 18 September 2002, and the Coldwater sheriff’s department definitely did pass it on as fact a few days later, but in the interests of full disclosure: maybe not on the 24th exactly.
Incidentally, while writing this, it occurred to me to remark that one of the clues that The Onion is not playing it straight is surely its name. But then I thought: how ridiculous is the name The Onion, though? So I did a quick search, and discovered that it’s produced in a country which also publishes De Queen Bee, The Laramie Boomerang, and The Jefferson Jimplecute. So, perhaps Dan Nichols can be at least partially forgiven.
There is also in the United States a paper called
Unterrified Democrat
…and this year, that’s something to be applauded.
