Mainstream Media Looks Absolutely Foolish After Falling for Fake Halloween Obesity Story
The problem with stories like this is that they are all close to things we see happening everyday in this country. It is one thing for clueless media to fall for it through a failure to fact check, quite something else for the audience to do so. As far as the audience is concerned, this is not a prank, designed to expose gulibility but a simple fabrication.
Mainstream Media Looks Absolutely Foolish After Falling for Fake Halloween Obesity Story
fake-halloween-letterIt’s usually not too difficult to find some way to make the “mainstream media” look like a bunch of fools. Quality journalism has given way to outrageous headlines and media outlets rushing to break the story first instead of getting the story right.
They’ll constantly seize on any story they think will bring them traffic by exploiting our need to often act like a lynch mob with torches and pitchforks when we read something that offends us.
A great example of this happened these last couple days when it seems that nearly every major media outlet and online blogger displayed complete outrage over a “story” that broke in North Dakota. This so-called “story” was about a woman who said she was planning to hand out letters to overweight kids instead of candy on Halloween. The letters would be in an envelope marked for the parents to read, and talked about how this woman thought the child was “moderately obese” and how the parents should “ration” their candy.
And holy hell, you’d have thought she was planning to dress up like Hitler to attend a Jewish Halloween festival.
Headlines like “Fat kids won’t get any Halloween candy” and stories about “fat shaming” flooded the internet based upon the news that one woman, out of over 300 million people in this country, planned to hand out this letter.
The media was “outraged.” And apparently so were millions of Americans who read these stories.
There’s just one problem - the story was fake. It was generated by Fargo, North Dakota’s own Y-94, a radio station known for pulling off pranks. Hell, what sounds like the same woman called in to the same station last year talking about the need to move deer crossing signs so the deer would cross at intersections where there would be less likelihood of a crash with a vehicle.