Judith Thurman chronicles the fabricated literary interviews penned by Tommaso Debenedetti, an Italian freelance journalist. His subjects include Philip Roth, John Grisham, Gore Vidal, Günter Grass, Toni Morrison, and other famous authors. [more inside]
posted by The Mouthchew on Apr 4, 2010 - 6 comments

Kodee Kennings, meet Kaycee Nicole. For two years the Daily Egyptian, the college paper of Southern Illinois University, published a column written by a young girl whose father was serving in Iraq. Two weeks ago, Sgt. Dan Kennings was reported killed in an attack on his Humvee, and the Chicago Tribune sent its reporters to cover the memorial service. Instead, they uncovered an hoax even grander in scale than one close to this site.
posted by holgate on Aug 26, 2005 - 73 comments

Hoaxed! In a follow-up to this thread where various news agencies were claiming the imminent demise of our blond brethren, based on "German experts" and WTO research, it turns out that the whole story was a hoax. It's either a case of serious journalistic inability to check sources...or the RTMark guys are at it again.
posted by dejah420 on Oct 1, 2002 - 9 comments

Recently, MTV had a special on 'hackers' (scroll down to last weeks show), but apparently the people they contacted for background info didn't give them an interesting enough story. So the guys made one up. The guy behind it all says he was just trying to make MTV's journalists look bad, but that's restating the obvious. Of course MTV is clueless and goes to any length to create a story. The worst part is that MTV isn't alone in this, every news outlet does this. The nightly news looks the way it does for the same reasons, it's all about entertainment.
posted by mathowie on Oct 18, 1999 - 0 comments