The Daily Currant, a satirical news site in the mold of the Onion, is on a roll. Last month, it duped a Washington Post blogger into passing along a completely manufactured story about Sarah Palin becoming the newest contributor to Al Gore’s Al Jazeera News. Palin, a climate change denier whose Islamophobic rants about the dangers of sharia law are second only to Michele Bachmann’s, would have been quite an unconventional — and hypocritical — star of Al Jazeera. Of course, the story was about as accurate as that “Planned Parenthood is Building an Abortionplex!” spoof that a handful of conservative legislators fell for last year. (Tip: Before you repeat an outlandish story, go here.)
Now the Daily Currant has struck again, this time with a piece about Paul Krugman, every liberal’s favorite economist, filing for bankruptcy. Supposedly, Krugman ran up such a tab at Tiffany’s that he’s now millions in debt — a scenario that might be a little more unlikely had that other paragon of fiscal responsibility, Newt Gingrich, not recently been in the news for his own million-dollar account at the pricey blue-box jeweler. But how much of an idiot do you have to be to believe lines like this?
The filing says that Krugman got into credit card trouble in 2004 after racking up $84,000 in a single month on his American Express black card in pursuit of rare Portuguese wines and 19th century English cloth. Rather than tighten his belt and pay the sums back, the pseudo-Keynesian economist decided to “stimulate” his way to a personal recovery by investing in expenses he hoped would one day boost his income.
A common meme on the right is that Krugman never admits when he’s wrong. (He does, but on the big issues, he’s more often right.) The Daily Currant story plays into this, spoofing the title of the economist’s blog — “The Conscience of a Liberal” — with the subhead “Conscience of a Fraud”:
Through his lawyer, Bertil Ohlin, Krugman explains that despite his travails with spending and debt in his personal finances, he stands by his pseudo-Keynesian policies.
“I still defend my analysis that on the macroeconomic level sovereign debt crises can be fixed by increasing government borrowing to lift aggregate demand. I admit, however, that on the microeconomic level this strategy has failed spectacularly.”
The since-deleted Breitbart piece in all its glory
Enough of an idiot, it turns out, to work for right-wing smear site Breitbart.com or, in a disappointing turn for anyone hoping that a legacy newspaper might have tighter quality controls than the site responsible for the “Friends of Hamas” Chuck Hagel rumor, the Boston Globe. The Globe passed along the Krugman story as a sort of gossip item, but Breibart penned this snarky piece, which has since vanished from the site but has been preserved by Slate:
Paul Krugman, the economic darling of the left, has filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection, according to Boston.com. Krugman has been the leading advocate for increased deficit spending as the only solution to turn the US economy around. He believes that President Obama needs to be even bolder with continued trillion dollar stimulus programs driving our nation deeper and deeper into debt. Apparently this Keynesian thing doesn’t really work on the micro level.
Flash back to the Post debacle, and you’ll find Breitbart’s writers gleefully slamming the ostensibly liberal paper for never letting “”facts get in the way of a good Narrative.” Here’s what the right-wing site’s John Nolte had to say about the Post:
Washington Post contributor Suzi Parker … made a very public spectacle of herself. In a blog post snarkily titled “Sarah Palin’s plan to reach ‘millions of devoutly religious people’ through al-Jazeera,” Parker used the Web pages of the once-legendary Washington Post to spread the incredible news that Palin had joined Al-Jazeera. This news was then used by Parker as the basis for a piece of left-wing smuggery that ripped Palin for being so desperate to stay relevant.
There was only one problem: The story of Palin joining Al-Jazeera is, duh, 100% false. Parker fell for an “Onion”-style satire published at the parody website The Daily Currant.
Yeah, because no Breitbart writer has ever employed “snark” or demonstrated insufferable “smuggery” of his own!
The Globe has also scrubbed its “oops” moment
At first glance, both the Post incident and the Breitbart error seem to be exercises in motivated thinking. We see what we want to see, even at the risk of falling for something that is too good to be true. It’s human nature to pick up on things that confirm our own biases and conform to a certain vision of the world. If you believe Sarah Palin really is a low-IQ hypocrite, an alliance with Al Jazeera may not seem like such a stretch. Likewise, if you think Paul Krugman is a moron who never met a deficit he didn’t like — actually, Krugman likes deficits only when they’re needed to get the economy back on track, a nuance his right-wing critics deliberately overlook — then the irony of the free-spending economist being taken to task for his profligate ways is too delicious to resist. That’s no excuse, of course, for shoddy journalism. If you can’t turn off your Palin hatred for long enough to Google a ridiculous-sounding story to make sure it’s true before passing on the smear, don’t call yourself a reporter — or even a very good blogger. Even the average Joe is smart enough not to believe everything he reads on the Internet. Just because a Photoshopped picture of the Pope riding a unicorn is all over Facebook, most people have the presence of mind not to call up their local pastor with the exciting news.
On Friday I started hearing from friends about a fake story making the rounds about my allegedly filing for personal bankruptcy; I even got asked about the story by a reporter from Russian television, who was very embarrassed when I told him it was fake. But I decided not to post anything about it; instead, I wanted to wait and see which right-wing media outlets would fall for the hoax.
Well, he didn’t have to wait for long.
What has gone unnoticed in all the hilarity is that the incident deals a body blow to Breibart’s theory of a lapdog liberal media eager to reprint nasty stories about conservatives. Suzi Parker’s lack of credulity over the Palin story was undoubtedly at least partly attributable to her personal dislike of Alaska’s Sweetheart, just as Breitbart’s own eagerness to bash Krugman stemmed from ideological animosity, but the Globe’s error doesn’t track with the “lamestream media” narrative. The Boston Globe is not a likely candidate for Krugman Derangement Syndrome; currently a New York Times property (though the Times is looking for a buyer, if anyone’s looking to drop a few million on some real quality journalism), the Globe is firmly ensconced in the pantheon of Great Liberal Newspapers.
So why did it fall for the Daily Currant hoax? Because reporters aren’t as uniformly left-wing or inherently hostile to conservatives as sites like Breitbart, whose appeal relies on the right’s hatred of traditional media outlets, are so quick to assume. Because juicy news, and the fear of missing a too-good-to-be-true scoop that actually turns out to be true, not ideology, is the driving force in the media world today. Traditional print publications are especially terrified of missing out on breaking news, of losing eyeballs and clicks to more partisan and slapdash sites like Gawer or — yes — Breitbart. (Though you do have to wonder why the Globe suddenly seized on a Currant story that had been online since last Tuesday.) That the Globe passed along the Krugman rumor is a sign of seriously shoddy journalism — as well as a cautionary story for any editor willing to let bloggers post to their sites without an appropriate fact-check — but it’s also a sign that the press isn’t nearly as biased as some people might think.
. . . So Well Read. . . 