Getting Hoaxed
Blogger Matthew Baldwin is sick and tired of the media misusing the word "hoax." A few days back, MSNBC Googled up a parody blog and included its fake quotes from Al Sharpton in their story on dog-killing former NFL quarterback Michael Vick. (Like Al Sharpton would have been so hard for the reporter to get on the phone—the trouble is getting Al Sharpton not on the phone! It's like phones come with Al Sharpton in them!) And so they ran a correction and said "MSNBC.com has determined that the blog is a hoax." Actually, no. No it's not!
Take it away, enraged blogger:
Hoax's reign as the scapegoat du jour dates back to the Boston "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" debacle in February of this year. "Two plead not guilty to Boston hoax charges" the CNN headline read, and the Boston authorities used the word "hoax" to describe the incident as often as they could. And the advantages of labeling something like this a hoax are obvious: you didn't massively overreact to a situation that the average person recognized as harmless, you were tricked into doing so! You didn't just take a quotation from a clearly phony article on a random webpage and build a story around in, you were duped! I'm not an idiot, I'm just easily gulled!
Mmm. Gulled. Now, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Now there was a great hoax.
