Iran’s Fars News Agency admitted on Sunday that its report “Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad to Obama,” was copied entirely from The Onion, a satirical American publication the editors in Tehran mistook for a news source.
FNA Apologizes for Recent Mistake //t.co/zEMJHedQ
An editor at the Iranian agency, which is close to the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, said in the long, somewhat grudging apology: “The news item was extracted from the satirical magazine, The Onion, by mistake and it was taken down” from the agency’s English-language Web site within two hours.
The unnamed editor went on to argue that the premise of the Onion report — that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is more popular with white, rural Americans than President Obama — might even be accurate, if fictional. “Although it does not justify our mistake,” he said, “we do believe that if a free opinion poll is conducted in the U.S., a majority of Americans would prefer anyone outside the U.S. political system to President Barack Obama.”
The editor made no mention of the fact that, as The Lede explained on Friday, Fars and at least two other Iranian news agencies also published Persian-language versions of The Onion’s story before it appeared in English.
He also did not acknowledge that there was anything wrong with the agency copying text from other publications without attribution. Large chunks of the apology itself appear to have been copied word-for-word from American news sites.
One passage, which recounts in detail other instances of news organizations mistaking Onion parodies for the genuine article, begins with text lifted from an Associated Press report on the confusion at Fars on Friday:
It’s not the first time a news outlet has been duped by The Onion…. In 2002, the Beijing Evening News, one of the Chinese capital’s biggest newspapers, picked up a story from The Onion that claimed members of Congress were threatening to leave Washington unless the building underwent a makeover that included more bathrooms and a retractable dome.
A whole paragraph of the Fars apology — on an illustration in The New York Times last year that accidentally included a photo from The Onion — is copied straight from a report by the Web site Mediaite on the newspaper’s correction:
The New York Times admitted they made the mistake of treating a fake creation from The Onion as something legitimate. Last week the Times printed an article documenting the history of the squeaky-clean teen magazine Tiger Beat, and included a retrospective of past magazine covers. Unfortunately (or humorously depending on one’s perspective), in the collection they also included a parody cover created by The Onion, which featured President Obama.
Another sentence — “In February, Rep. John Fleming (R-La.), deleted a Facebook post in which he linked to an Onion article about Planned Parenthood that he did not realize was satirical” — comes from a Politico report last Friday on the Fars mishap.
The rest of the Fars apology is a long recitation of “goofs” made by BBC News journalists, compiled by The Telegraph, although none of them involved mistaking fiction for fact.
As Kevin Fallon noted in The Daily Beast on Saturday, others who have mistaken Onion stories for real news reports include: the editors and readers of the Fox News site Fox Nation — who fell for “ Frustrated Obama Sends Nation Rambling 75,000-Word Email” — and a tabloid in Bangladesh, which translated “Conspiracy Theorist Convinces Neil Armstrong Moon Landing Was Faked” into Bengali, but did at least have the decency to attribute the report to The Onion News Network. The paper’s associate editor explained later to Agence France-Press, “We thought it was true, so we printed it without checking.”
The Web site Literally Unbelievable is dedicated to documenting instances of Onion parodies that are mistaken for real news on Facebook. As Glynnis MacNicol explained in a Mediaite report in 2010, a very large number of people expressed serious alarm about a YouTube clip headlined “Illuminati Warning: Martial Law Plans Revealed?” which appeared to show a Congressman describing dark plans for the American people during a speech. The video turned out to be from O-Span, The Onion’s parody version of C-Span.
Also on Sunday, a jury in Tehran found a Reuters editor guilty of anti-state propaganda, because a colleague incorrectly described a group of women studying the martial art of ninjutsu to stay in shape in a video report as potential “assassins” willing “to defend the Islamic Republic to the death.” The jury’s finding is advisory and and a judge is expected to issue a final verdict in the case against the news agency’s Iranian bureau chief, Parisa Hafezi, next month.
The Reuters bureau in Tehran has been closed since March, when the errors in the voice-over script for the television report on the female “ninjas” came to the attention of Iranian officials. Ms. Hafezi, an Iranian national, has been barred from leaving the country.
As Reuters explains, the bureau chief “formally leads Reuters’ Iran operations, but is only responsible for the text stories written by the bureau, not the visuals, captions or scripts produced by the television journalists or photographers.” At Reuters and other television news agencies, the narration for television reports from many parts of the world is often added in London by relatively junior journalists.