Boston Globe duped by satirical story that Paul Krugman had filed for bankruptcy

Boston Globe duped by satirical story that Paul Krugman had filed for bankruptcy

ErrorHow does the Boston Globe react after publishing a bogus report based on a satirical news account? By scrubbing the online version of the page and replacing it with a 404 error.

Unfortunately for the Globe, National Review Online managed to grab a snapshot of the page, which appears after the break.

NRO’s Andrew Johnson notes that the phony report — that New York Times columnist and  Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman had filed for personal bankruptcy — appeared in The Daily Currant, a satirical news website similar to The Onion.

Fake Article

In fairness, the author of the article at Boston.com (who writes under the byline “Prudent Investor”) didn’t fall directly for The Currant article, which he pulled from an Austrian business magazine called Format that had taken the bait earlier. To Prudent Investor’s discredit, It is nevertheless incumbent on a journalist to verify a secondhand source, so the egg on the face remains.

In any case, it is fairly classless of the Globe to replace an article published under embarrassing circumstances with a “missing page” error instead of owning up to its mistake.

The Daily Currant meantime added a big notch to its belt last month when it ran a piece claiming that Sarah Palin was joining Al Jazeera as a commentator in order to “reach millions of devoutly religious people.” One columnist who was taken in by the fake news report was the Washington Post’s Suzi Parker, who gleefully reported that the “once-upon-a-time darling” of FOX News Channel had joined the network, adding, “Ironically, Fox News recently called Al Jazeera ‘an anti-American terror mouthpiece.’”

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Howard Portnoy

Howard Portnoy

Howard Portnoy has written for The Blaze, HotAir, NewsBusters, Weasel Zippers, Conservative Firing Line, RedCounty, and New York’s Daily News. He has one published novel, Hot Rain, (G. P. Putnam’s Sons), and has been a guest on Radio Vice Online with Jim Vicevich, The Alana Burke Show, Smart Life with Dr. Gina, and The George Espenlaub Show.

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