Media Literacy - The Art of the Prank

October 21, 2013December 15, 2023

Fox News’ Spin Doctors – Keeping the Critics at Bay

Fox News Reportedly Used Fake Commenter Accounts To Rebut Critical Blog Posts
by Ben Dimiero
Media Matters
October 20, 2013

New Book Details An Extensive Campaign By The Networks’ PR Staffers

fox-sockpuppet-425

NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes in his forthcoming book Murdoch’s World that Fox News’ public relations staffers used an elaborate series of dummy accounts to fill the comments sections of critical blog posts with pro-Fox arguments.

In a chapter focusing on how Fox utilized its notoriously ruthless public relations department in the mid-to-late 00’s, Folkenflik reports that Fox’s PR staffers would “post pro-Fox rants” in the comments sections of “negative and even neutral” blog posts written about the network. According to Folkenflik, the staffers used various tactics to cover their tracks, including setting up wireless broadband connections that “could not be traced back” to the network.

A former staffer told Folkenflik that they had personally used “one hundred” fake accounts to plant Fox-friendly commentary: Read the whole article here.

via Huffington Post

September 3, 2013December 15, 2023

Eyeball-licking Craze? Really?

From W.J. Elvin III: An interesting study in mainstream media wiggling and waffling. They should have just said “We were suckered. Sorry.” But instead a lot of jabber about how they were just one of many, “maybe” dropped the ball as far as fact-checking and heeding warnings, blah, blah, blah…

The readers’ editor on”¦ how we fell into the trap of reporting Japan’s eyeball-licking craze as fact
bu Chris Elliott
The Guardian
August 25, 2013

The story was all over the web, but it was not especially difficult to cast doubts on the claim that there was an epidemic of tongue-induced pink eye

lick2-200 The web is voracious. It gobbles up stories, themes and memes like a monster from outer space. With the merest puff of wind to launch them, a bewildering slew of tales take off, powered by the perpetual motion of repetition.

The Guardian was among a crowd that made the mistake of filling the sails of one of the weirder stories to take off in this way. The article appeared on the Shortcuts blog. It aims to be a fast-paced humorous column, which is described as “trending topics and news analysis”.

[Video from Huffington Post]

http://pshared.5min.com/Scripts/PlayerSeed.js?sid=281&width=425&height=262&playList=517814303

The headline on the story, posted on 14 June 2013, is: “Eyeball-licking: the fetish that is making Japanese teenagers sick”. The author explains that the article will be about “oculolinctus, an eye-licking fetish that is currently sweeping across the schools of Japan like, well, like a great big dirty bacteria-coated tongue sweeping across a horrific number of adolescent eyeballs “¦ oculolinctus is being blamed for a significant rise in Japanese cases of conjunctivitis and eye-chlamydia “¦ It’s apparently seen as a new second-base; the thing you graduate to when kissing gets boring.” Continue reading “Eyeball-licking Craze? Really?”

September 14, 2010December 15, 2023

Dylan, the Consummate Sampler?

Here’s an essay by Scott Warmuth for New Haven Review regarding Dylan’s hidden charlatanism subtext in Chronicles: Volume One

Bob Charlatan
Deconstructing Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One
by Scott Warmuth
New Haven Review

The world luvs to be cheated, but they want to hav it dun bi an honest man, and not bi a hornet and then they never seem to git tired ov it.
“”Josh Billings

When Bob Dylan”s memoir Chronicles: Volume One was released in 2004 it received overwhelmingly positive reviews. Dylan”s recollections came off as disarmingly personal; the use of language in his prose was said to be as distinctive and captivating as it is in his songs. But over the past several years, in loose collaboration with Edward Cook, of Washington, DC, I have been giving Chronicles a closer look. Ed is, among other things, an editor of The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation“”deciphering and translating are his business””but he is also a Bob Dylan fan and blogger. In 2006, he first posted about borrowings in Chronicles: Volume One from Mark Twain, Marcel Proust, and jazzman Mezz Mezzrow”s 1946 autobiography Really the Blues; later he posted about borrowings from Jack London and even Sax Rohmer, creator of Dr. Fu Manchu. And together Ed and I have found in Chronicles an author, Bob Dylan, who has embraced camouflage to an astounding degree, in a book that is meticulously fabricated, with one surface concealing another, from cover to cover.

Dozens upon dozens of quotations and anecdotes have been incorporated from other sources. Dylan has hidden many puzzles, jokes, secret messages, secondary meanings, and bizarre subtexts in his book. After many months of research my copy of Chronicles: Volume One is drenched in highlighter and filled with marginalia and I have a thigh-high stack of books, short stories, and periodicals that Dylan drew from to work his autobiographical alchemy. Continue reading “Dylan, the Consummate Sampler?”

April 11, 2010December 15, 2023

Video Projector Pranks: When One Equals Two

As seen on Laughing Squid, posted by Aaron Muszalski on April 6, 2010:

Matthew Weathers, a Mathematics and Computer Science Professor at Biola University in Southern California, has a charming talent for surprising his students with clever video projector pranks.

For a tutorial on how Matthew Weathers creates these video projector pranks, click here.

January 29, 2010December 15, 2023

LiteratEye #49: Biff! Bam! Super-Journalist Takes On the Academics

Here’s the forty-ninth installment of LiteratEye, a series found only on The Art of the Prank Blog, by W.J. Elvin III, editor and publisher of FIONA: Mysteries & Curiosities of Literary Fraud & Folly and the LitFraud blog.

LiteratEye #49: Biff! Bam! Super-Journalist Takes On the Academics
By W.J. Elvin III
January 29, 2010

“I have never done any research that shows blondes are more aggressive, entitled, angry or ‘warlike’ than brunette or redheads.” Aaron Sell, Center for Evolutionary Psychology, in a letter to the Times of London.

You probably noticed the anti-British journalist rant posted on this site yesterday, provoked by the article referred to above. If not, it’s still available for your reading enjoyment.

The controversy has been getting a lot of play on sites catering to scholars such as Arts & Letters Daily as well as some more popular arenas like Defamer.

Thus far, though, no one seems to be standing up for British journalists. Until now, that is. Here in the LiteratEye bunker we’re taking a contrarian position on the matter. We declare British journalists to be the best and brightest in the business.

As I recall, old school British journalists could typically run circles around their American counterparts as news-getters and as entertaining writers. The few I’ve known as editors could no doubt have donned general’s uniforms and tidied up Afghanistan and Iraq in short order.

Their secret – and I’m speaking here of those I knew in the good old days — is that they understood and served reader interest. I’m sure they could have produced brilliant thumb-sucker think pieces or razor-sharp analysis of yet another boring issue. Or they could have written suck-up puff stories touting their intimate buddy-buddy relationships with the high and mighty. But, no, they wrote for the fellow who, over his morning coffee, would peek from behind the paper to say: “Jumpin’ cheeses, Alice, listen to this!” Continue reading “LiteratEye #49: Biff! Bam! Super-Journalist Takes On the Academics”