``The media can never deny coverage to a good spectacle. No matter how ridiculous, absurd, insane or illogical something is, if it achieves a certain identity as a spectacle, the media has to deal with it. They have no choice. They're hamstrung by their own needs, to the extent that they're like a puppet in the face of such events.''

- Mark Pauline

If there's one thing that the left and the right can agree on, it's that news reporting is terribly inaccurate, riddled with bias, and is more likely to cement popular prejudice than to uncover uncomfortable truths. So there's a certain satisfaction in deliberately planting absurd fiction among all the news that's fit.

I've heard enough about the plagarist Raëlians! In 1978, long before the more recent cloning noise, a fellow named David Rorvik reported that the cloning of human beings was already being accomplished at a remote laboratory, spurred on by a California millionaire desiring a cloned heir.

But the news media still can't seem to resist 'em - hoaxes about clones, tuplets, male pregnancies, bizarre births, cross-species impregnations, virgin conceptions, and the like show up all the time.

But, alas, suggestions that reporters stop being so goddamned gullible continue to fall on deaf ears.

One clever cracker broke into the Yahoo! News web site and started altering the wire stories that appeared there:

[Adrian] Lamo tampered with Yahoo!'s copy of a Reuters story that described a delay in [Dmitry] Sklyarov's court proceedings, so that the text reported, incorrectly, that the Russian was facing the death penalty.

The modified story warned sardonically that Sklyarov's work raised ``the haunting specter of inner-city minorities with unrestricted access to literature, and through literature, hope.''

The text went on to report that Attorney General John Ashcroft held a press conference about the case before ``cheering hordes'', and incorrectly quoted Ashcroft as saying, ``They shall not overcome. Whoever told them that the truth shall set them free was obviously and grossly unfamiliar with federal law.''...

The hacker provided SecurityFocus with a screen shot showing an August 10^th Reuters story about a Senate committee's report on the National Security Agency. The screen shot shows the story on Yahoo! News with a false quote attributed to the report: ``Rebuilding the NSA is the committee's top priority. In partnership with AOL Time Warner, we fully expect to bring you a service you can't refuse.''

Another clever htmlerator exploited a quirk in how web browsers interpret web page addresses to make his page look as though it were appearing on CNN's own site. Amazingly enough, ``CNN.com unwittingly helped perpetuate the hoax by directing users to the external bogus report; this made 'Singer Britney Spears Killed in Car Accident' the 'Most Popular' story credited to CNN.com, without it ever actually residing on the news site's pages.''

Crackers also hit the USA Today website - adding stories about a new White House propaganda minister and about the Pope admitting Christianity to be bunk.

The Falun Gong movement took things up a notch by hijacking the satellite feed of one of China's largest television stations to broadcast Falun Gong propaganda.

And Army Newswatch, a TV show produced by the U.S. Army was hijacked one day in Webster, New York, by twenty minutes of hardcore gay porn.

PBS reports that in the 1990s, as Yugoslavia's independent radio station B92 became more radicalized, it was in danger of being shut down by the government:

A rumor to that effect was already circulating through Belgrade, and [Veran] Matic took advantage of it. For an entire day the station broadcast as if it had been taken over by the regime, with different DJs, playing Yugo-rock and turbofolk, and relaying official news bulletins. Listeners were ``freaking out,'' said Matic. ``People were calling and saying: `What's happening? What are you doing to us?''' The following day, B92 broadcast the tapes of the more than 600 phone calls received at the station during the prank, sending what Matic called ``a clear message to the authorities that they would encounter strong resistance in closing down B92.''

Slate magazine reported that down in Florida, the locals liked to go monkeyfishing at an island where primates were being raised for medical tests. They'd cast hooked fruit over tree branches and then, if they were lucky, a poor monkey would be reeled in, ``flying from the trees, a juicy apple stapled to its palm.''

To many readers, this screamed of bullshit. It reads to me a bit like a ``modest proposal'' - you provoke outrage at torturing monkeys and then ask implicitly why the indignant reader isn't outraged at the everyday torture of raising animals to undergo cruel medical tests.

In any case, Slate editor Michael Kinsley at first huffily defended the story, and then, after more questions began to be asked by his journalistic peers, he eventually backed down and apologized.

Which reminds me of another Kinsley project, The New Republic, which was hacked by its associate editor Stephen Glass (who also pulled the wool over the eyes of many another editorial staff). In 1998 he was discovered to have been writing fiction in the form of news articles and features.

And this might also remind you of Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her (alas, fictional) story of Jimmy, the 8-year-old heroin addict. Last spotted, Cooke was working retail, but had signed on to a movie project about the hoax. (See also, Mike Barnicle)

It's not too late to play... Slate is still ripe for fooling.

In 2002 the San Francisco Chronicle repeated the tall tale that a man had installed an automatic teller machine as a tombstone so that his relatives would have to visit his grave in order to retrieve their inheritance.

Also that year, when the fad of reality TV seemed like it would never die, and each new contender was more crass than the last, the Los Angeles New Times reported that a new NBC show, ``Survive This'' would be hosted by two teenagers who had recently survived a kidnapping and rape. It was a satire, but it wasn't until NBC denied the report that anyone noticed.

Over on our Hacktivism page are stories of hacked and altered web pages. But here you can read about a web page hack that never existed - except in emails sent to the press.

Thirteen of the largest daily newspapers in Russia rushed to print in 2001 with the news of an exciting new five-floor consumer electronics store in Moscow. The store didn't exist - it was cooked up by a public relations firm and designed to show how by putting the right money in the right palms you can get the Russian media to print commercial disinformation as though it were news - in all but one of the thirteen examples, verbatim as received.

This is a bit more serious in Russia than it would be, say, in the United States. In Russia, this practice is both unethical and illegal.

Inspired by all of this media mayhem, and dismayed about journalism standards, Paul Maliszewski operated under a number of aliases to plant bullshit and satire in The Business Journal of Central New York:

How many fake writers did I invent? About as many as the months I spent working at The Business Journal full-time.

In my spare time I manufactured whole companies. They emerged from my head wildly profitable and fully staffed with ambitious assistants obeying the bidding of sage bosses. If my fictional characters filed tax returns, I probably would have been personally responsible for creating more new jobs in central New York than any non-fictional company.

I littered my fictions with bogus references and bastardized quotations from literature, less to show off my fine education than to underline how utterly irrelevant it now seemed. I quoted Donald Barthelme but made the words pass through the dead lips of Adam Smith. In another counterfeit, I drew names of characters from a New York Review of Books essay about Vincent Van Gogh forgers and the businessmen who knowingly peddled the knock-offs.

Maliszewski even translated a School of the Americas torturer's instruction manual into business-speak to report on management skills. Kudos!

When 60 Minutes reporters arrived at an ``autonomous youth center'' in Zurich to report on the radical youth scene there, a crew from the center captured them, tied them up, and covered them with paint - all the while video-taping the events.

Then they released the crew and went on to sell the video tape to CBS.

In 1875, the Chicago Times went to print with a gruesome story of a horrific theater fire that took the lives of hundreds. Audience members were trapped, unable to escape, thanks to poorly-designed buildings and the unsafe, overcrowded conditions encouraged by a greedy theater owner.

The story was a hoax, as hinted in a subheadline far into the article (``Description of a Suppostitious Holocaust Likely to Occur Any Night''). But it dramatized the real problem of unsafe conditions more effectively than straightforward muckraking could have.

The warning in the hoax proved to have been prophetic. A theater fire on December 30^th, 1903 killed hundreds in Chicago - the theater was overcrowded, people trying to escape died pressed up against doors that opened inward, neither fire alarms nor sprinklers were installed in the building, and some exits had been locked.

A couple of psychology grad students created a group called Citizens Concerned About Barney that complained that the big purple dinosaur of kids TV fame was responsible for leading children to ``cocaine, gang violence, pornography, abortion, homosexuality, and maybe even marijuana.'' CNN (among others) found the bait too tempting to resist.

The tabloid TV newsters down under got drawn in by a group that agitates for unemployed workers:

Both Channel 9's A Current Affair and 7's Today Tonight ran competing stories on the fictional group the ``Dole Army.'' They claimed to expose gangs of jobless militants inhabiting Melbourne's drains, surfacing only to scavenge food from bins - and organising through the internet.

Today Tonight reporter Norm Beaman's introductory voiceover began: ``if it wasn't true, it would almost be comical.'' It wasn't true and the joke's on you, Norm.

These ridiculous stories of sewer-dwellers would have more accurately described the journalists themselves. ``We approached them with the exactly the kind of story they love and they lapped it up like dogs,'' said the Dole Army's Emma Goldman.

Rick Mercer, a wit from Canada, is fond of pulling media pranks that exploit the ignorance of the Maple Leaf State that is borne blissfully by residents of the other fifty.

During the U.S. government's presidential campaign of 2000, he posed questions to candidate George W. Bush about Canadian Prime Minster ``Jean Poutine'' - their Prime Minister actually goes by the name ``Jean Chrétien,'' while ``poutine'' is an artery-hardening dietary staple of the great white northerner. Naturally, Bush didn't catch on.

Other highlights: Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee praised Canadian efforts to rescue their ``national igloo'' from the threat of global warming. And a number of U.S. professors signed Mercer's petition calling for an end to the barbaric ``Toronto polar bear hunt.''

TOKYO, May 28, 1947 (UPI) ``An Army radio station described for a gag today a 'battle' between American soldiers and a 'twenty-foot sea monster' in the streets of Tokyo. The description was so vivid that Gen. Douglas MacArthur was reported to have been fooled, as well as thousands of Americans and Britons. For more than three hours the telephones of Station WVTR and of Army agencies were clogged with telephone calls from Americans and Britons, some of whom were frankly frightened. According to a member of the station's staff, one caller was General MacArthur.''

The WVTR report went on in all seriousness for over an hour, giving the play-by-play as the monster failed to be subdued by small-arms fire and eventually was only stopped by flamethrowers. Japanese police and U.S. soldiers went on the alert and ran around Tokyo on a monster quest. Several years later, Godzilla was filmed - coïncidence?

Britain's satirical TV show Brass Eye turned its cycloptic gaze on the moral St. Vitus Dance that erupts whenever the topic of pædophilia comes up in the media. They hit the mark and then some - fooling politicians and celebrities like Phil Collins into recording absurd public service announcements. And then, of course, all holy hell broke loose as a gazillion people screamed ``that's not funny'' all at once.

C. Louis Mortison added spice to his journalism with tall-tale filler-articles about the amazing things that happened to one mythical Lester Green.

On April Fools Day, 1957, the BBC television news broadcast a splendid story about the Swiss spaghetti harvest.

Edgar Allan Poe knew that he was a better fiction writer than a newspaper reporter, but also that news paid better. So he wrote a fictional news story about two people who crossed the Atlantic on a hot air balloon and he got it printed in the New York Sun. (Poe also took on a hoaxbusting rôle, investigating and exposing the ruse of Wolfgang von Kempelen's chess-playing robot, and writing about ``Diddling'' [con games] ``Considered as One of the Exact Sciences.'')

Another fine hoax on (or perhaps by) the 19^th Century New York Sun was the announcement that life has been discovered on the moon, seen through a very powerful telescope, and resembling bipedal bats.

The New York Times breathlessly rushed to print in 1992 with an article about ``grunge'' that followed the standard template for reporting on the latest youth music and fashion trends. A sidebar described the ``lexicon of grunge'' - interpreting the hip lingo of the whippersnappers (``swingin' on the flippity-flop'': v. hanging out). Of course, it was more blatantly fictional than that which is more frequently seen as ``fit to print.''

Luther Blissett of San Luis Obispo, California - home of the agricultural finishing school and day-care center known as Cal Poly - created a mythical fraternity called Lambda Sigma Delta (get it?) and suddenly letters-to-the-editor started appearing in local papers about the frat's magnanimous activities.

Letters-to-the-editor are a good place for the news troller to get started. Peter van der Linden forged an editoral from the attorney general promoting the use of illegal drugs, and sent in a silly letter allegedly from a group called The Society for Making English Grandeur More Accessible (a.k.a. S.M.E.G.M.A.).

A yippie provocateur wrote a letter-to-the-editor of the Berkeley Barb in 1967 claiming to have gotten high from smoking banana peels, and pretty soon the ``news'' was making headlines from the San Francisco Chronicle to Time magazine.

Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter-to-the-editor back in 1790 in which he claimed to have found a well-reasoned defense of slavery remarkably similar to a recent speech by Senator Jackson - only this defense was written in 1687 by one Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim to justify the enslavement of white Christians in Algeria.

A group of Italian cultural terrorists spoofed a tabloid TV ``missing persons'' show called Chi l'ha visto? with a report of someone who was so missing that he never even existed. ``We did not want only to throw discredit on the show,'' reported the pranksters, ``but also put their inquiring eyes off the track and make them waste their time following a nonexistant person, so that the real runaways might remain anonymous and uncontrolled.''

Harry Reichenbach fed the media spurious scoops in order to get free publicity for his patrons. Among his best hacks was getting smutbuster Anthony Comstock to become outraged about the painting ``September Morn'' whereupon the prints that had been taking up valuable shelf space gathering dust at a dime a pop suddenly sold seven million copies at a buck each.

A marketing firm got some well-deserved exposure through its campaign to raise public awareness about the emerging sport of professional indoor ice fishing. ``Catch the Fever'' is the advertising slogan of the Minnesota Woodticks.

Remember the mysterious ``companion object'' following the Hale-Bopp comet? It set off a lot of alarms among the usual suspects of abductees, ufologists, end-timers and Heaven's Gate cultists. Turns out it was the brainchild of one Chuck Shramek, who (according to a friend) has been playing these sort of pranks for some time now.

In 1983 a tape recording of a telephone conversation between U.S. government president Ronald Reagan and British government prime minister Margaret Thatcher was sent anonymously to newspapers; a cover letter claimed that the recordings were the result of a crossed line. London's Sunday Times and the San Francisco Chronicle covered the story, with the Times following the lead of the U.S. State Department, which described the tapes as part of ``an increasingly sophisticated Russian disinformation campaign.'' The tapes were actually the work of the punk rock group Crass who made them by splicing together bits of speeches made by the two politicians that were recorded from news broadcasts.

Photo-doctoring tools have long been stock-in-trade to the revisionist historian trying to remove Trotsky from all the old class photos or what have you. Now that the ordinary schmoe can do a professional fake job, the Pulitzer Prize-winning news photo is more art and less luck than ever before.

Of course, you still have to be sensible about it. Don't do what the University of Wisconsin at Madison did. They were preparing their undergraduate application materials and for the cover, they wanted a photo of the student body that demonstrated its alleged racial diversity. Alas, they could find no such photo, so they added an arbitrary black student's face to a photo of a sea of white football fans. As if that wasn't enough of a Bad Idea to begin with, the token negro turned out to be Diallo Shabazz, ``a prominent African American student activist who has never attended a UW football game and is deeply involved in efforts to promote campus diversity.''

How to diversificate your campus

Step 1:
Find a great photo of happy smiling students, for instance at a football game

Step 2:
Find a photo of a negro, any old negro will do, even a student activist who might get insulted

Step 3:
Place the cropped negro head in a noticable but not particularly prominent place. Presto: diversification!

Truth is no stranger to fiction.

The police aren't above using these ever-improving tools of photo and video editing to improve evidence.

How many times has a country gone to war in the midst of a frenzy whipped up by disinformation planted in the media? You might as well just ask how many times a country has gone to war. The answer's the same.

Those of you from the U.S.A. may ``Remember The Maine'' - or the barbarous Huns - or the Tonkin Gulf incident - or the cocaine found in Manuel Noriega's fridge - or the babies thrown out of incubators by barbaric Iraqi troops - or the prisoners starving in Serbian death camps - or the specific, credible threat to Air Force One on 9/11 - or Saddam Hussein's advanced nuclear weapons program.

Remember how Pierre Salinger was convinced that the U.S. Navy shot down TWA flight 800? He read it right here on the internet where falsehood dares not show its face! And Seymour Hersh almost got taken in by phony documents proving that Marilyn Monroe was paid hush money by JFK to hide their affair.

In 2002, the Associated Press fired reporter Christopher Newton after discovering that many of the people and organizations cited in his stories could not be found. Jack Shafer of Slate magazine dug a little deeper into this story: ``None of Newton's disputed talking heads are the primary sources for the stories. They appear halfway or two-thirds of the way through his stories, very much according to the AP formula, to contribute the opposing view of a professor or an interest group spokesperson... Content-free, these cliché sound bites add nothing to the story except to say that there's another side to the story.... Every day, thousands of reporters pad their stories to fit the stock news formula... If it's a journalistic crime for Christopher Newton to invent characters who mouth empty but passable clichés, what's the name of the offense when respectable reporters deliberately harvest the same worthless clichés from bona fide sources?''

One reporter tells the story of how he bought into the whole Church of Kurt Cobain hoax in the media feeding frenzy that followed the suicide of the latest jukebox hero.

Speaking of the fabulously dead, Princess Diana (before she died) was impersonated by an actress who was caught on film cavorting in her bra - it was all over the papers the next day.

Two hard-working modern masters of the media hack are Joey Skaggs and Alan Abel. Skaggs has conned the press with such silliness as a computer that can replace trial judges, a virtual sex company and a chain of theme-park-like graveyards. Abel, for his part, founded the anti-animal-nudity activist group ``Society for Indecency to Naked Animals'' (don't laugh) and the group Citizens Against Breast-Feeding among his many media stunts. And despite what you might read in the Times, he's still alive and kicking.

I should also mention here Orson Welles' and Howard Koch's 1938 sci-fi radio play The War of the Worlds which was interpreted as a newscast by many horrified listeners. This was shadowed more recently by Jing Huiwen, whose news of the Sibuxiang beast spread alarm in China.

Radio personality Howard Stern's fans have taken on the media hack as a crusade - zapping TV news coverage of the O.J. Simpson car chase, the U.S. Capitol shootings of '98, and any other news event, no matter how trivial, that they can use as an opportunity to sling baloney.

Some media hacks are not the product of deliberate hoaxers, but are best understood as autonomous and contagious idea infections: Urban legends like the LSD Tattoo warning, or the ongoing media portrayal of the United States as a free and democratic country.

Other quasi-hacks fall under the category of April Fools or lazy reporters.

Commentator, satirist and all-around fun guy H.L. Mencken published a made-up history of the bathtub for shits and grins, never guessing that it would be accepted as gospel truth from that moment on. It's still taken seriously in some quarters.

Luther Blissett is trying the same sort of game with his fictional venereal disease, ``The Clam.'' Jeez. It's almost getting to the point where you can't trust what you read on the web anymore.

Want to get started in the news trolling hobby? Form a chapter of the activist group Arm the Homeless in your community. The press can't seem to resist biting when you throw them bait as good as this tasty blend of left-wing homelessness activism and right-wing firearm advocacy.

Sometimes, if culture jammers are getting lazy, agents of the press will engage in their own pranks. The San Francisco (California) Weekly responded to increasingly angry anti-gentrification sentiment by running an ad promoting a yuppie anti-defamation demonstration in hopes of catching other papers (and activists) with this tasty lure.

In 1983, at the height of the ``Cabbage Patch Doll'' hysteria, a couple of radio announcers in Milwaukee told listeners that a B-52 would be dropping over a thousand of the dolls over Milwaukee County Stadium. A couple dozen people showed up, prepared to hold their credit cards up for an aerial photograph so they would be eligible to catch one of the plummeting must-haves.

Michael Born, a freelance documentary producer in Germany, made up the news as he went along, creating German KKK rallies, interviewing Albanian ``Kurds'' and German ``Austrian terrorists,'' and following a domestic cat hunter he hired to stalk some cute fluffy thing with a rifle to report on this alarming trend.

These TV newsmagazines are ripe pickings for freelancers who know that fiction and fact don't amount to much when it comes to paycheck time.