Media Literacy - The Art of the Prank

October 16, 2009December 15, 2023

LiteratEye #35: Ghost Story: The Riddle of Who Wrote What

Here’s the thirty fifth 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 #35: Ghost Story: The Riddle of Who Wrote What
By W.J. Elvin III
October 16, 2009

seance-200 It may come as a surprise to some that Sean Connery, in his recent book, Being A Scot, provides a truly enlightening cultural history lesson.

The book, issued by Phoenix Illustrated and as yet available only as an expensive import here in the States, surveys Scottish creativity, inventiveness and history. And, since it”s autobiographical in its own quirky way, there”s the necessarily egocentric focus on Connery.

Of particular interest to armchair detectives of the LiteratEye squad is the invitation to help solve a literary mystery.

Connery presents a gloom-and-doom quote, written two hundred years ago but obviously appropriate in the present day. Sorry if it”s a bit windy and profound, it”s Sir Sean”s puzzle, not mine:

“A democracy is always temporary, and therefore cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It will only exist until the voters discover that they can reward themselves with the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury. A democracy therefore always collapses over loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a great dictatorship. The average age of the world”s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”

Connery says the quote traces to the voluminous works of a fellow Scot, the historian Alexander Fraser Tytler. It was given new life in a speech by President Ronald Reagan (who, ironically, sparked massive raids on the public treasury to compensate for the economic crimes and disasters resulting from his deregulation debacles).

What Connery wants to know is just where in Tytler”s work does the quote appear? A search of Tytler archives in the U.S. and Scotland failed to turn up the exact source. Continue reading “LiteratEye #35: Ghost Story: The Riddle of Who Wrote What”

October 16, 2009December 15, 2023

British Tabloids Hoaxed

Submitted by Mark Borkowski:

Starsuckers celebrity hoax dupes tabloids
by Paul Lewis
Guardian.co.uk
14 October 2009

From ‘flamey’ Amy Winehouse to Russell Brand the banker, documentary team’s fake celebrity stories fooled editors

Watch interview with filmmaker Chris Atkins here.
Visit Starsuckers Website here.

starsuckers-200 The plan to subvert the pages of some of Fleet Street’s bestselling newspapers was hatched in a windowless office in east London. For months, a team of documentary makers had sat in the Brick Lane film studio they called “the cell”, trawling through tabloid clippings in search of stories they could prove were untrue.

They decided to concoct an experiment to test their theory that tabloid editors sometimes publish celebrity stories with scant regard for the truth.

“We consumed a lot of coffee thinking about it,” said Chris Atkins, the director of the forthcoming film Starsuckers. “How can we do this intelligently? How can we prove our point? But how can we make it funny?” Continue reading “British Tabloids Hoaxed”

October 9, 2009December 15, 2023

LiteratEye #34: Between the Covers: What”s It Like to Be in a Book?

Here’s the thirty fourth 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 #34: Between the Covers: What”s It Like to Be in a Book?
By W.J. Elvin III
October 9, 2009

FOUR-190 Once upon a time it was something of a rarity to appear personally in print, or even to know someone who”d been written about.

Today, it”s routine to be mentioned in someone”s blog, or, failing that, to spend five minutes launching a blog and filling it with “me, me, me.”

But it”s still a bit extraordinary to be in a book unless one has achieved celebrity or notoriety. When it happens to ordinary folk, the experience may come as a welcome surprise or a humiliating shock.

Certainly a book could be written covering all the lawsuits that have resulted from unwelcome attention of that sort.https://artoftheprank.com/blog/wp-admin/index.php?page=stats

For me, a career in the news business has meant frequently writing about others and rarely being written about myself.

I was, for many years, a Washington “insider” columnist and feature writer.

I”ve often run across books mentioning intrigues, scandals and skullduggery that I”d unearthed or expanded upon.

But that”s not the same as actually being named and perhaps profiled. Continue reading “LiteratEye #34: Between the Covers: What”s It Like to Be in a Book?”

July 30, 2009December 15, 2023

LiteratEye #24: Home-Made Hocus Pocus Masquerades as Wisdom of an Ancient People

Here’s the twenty fourth 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. In this installment, Elvin continues his survey of literary fraud focused on Australia…

LiteratEye #24: Home-Made Hocus Pocus Masquerades as Wisdom of an Ancient People
By W.J. Elvin III
July 31, 2009

aborigines-425 “Jangga Meenya Bomunggur.”

In other words, “The smell of the white man is killing us.”

That’s from the Dumbartung Aboriginal Corporation’s mission statement, a very powerful statement and well worth checking out.

The Dumbartung group is an arts advocacy organization in Australia.

One thing the indigenous people find stinky about the white man, or in this case, woman, is exploitation through false claims of association and knowledge.

There have been several cases of authors making false claims of that sort. One in particular provoked Aborigine delegations to track down the perpetrator, Marlo Morgan.

They tried to confront Morgan, author of Mutant Message Down Under, in the United States and Japan.

Morgan made millions from Mutant. In it, she claimed she was kidnapped by a mysterious band of Aborigines, forced to go on desert walkabout, and ultimately initiated into realms of secret knowledge. Continue reading “LiteratEye #24: Home-Made Hocus Pocus Masquerades as Wisdom of an Ancient People”

July 27, 2009December 15, 2023

And That”s Not the Way It Is

And That”s Not the Way It Is
by Frank Rich
The New York Times
July 26, 2009

WHO exactly was the competition in the race to be the most trusted man in America? Lyndon Johnson? Richard Nixon?

walter-cronkite2 Not to take anything away from Walter Cronkite, but he beat out Henry Kissinger by only four percentage points when a 1974 Roper poll asked Americans whom they most respected. The successive blows of Vietnam and Watergate during the Cronkite “60s and “70s shattered the nation”s faith in most of its institutions, public and private, and toppled many of the men who led them. Such was the dearth of trustworthy figures who survived that an unindicted official in a disgraced White House could make the cut.

In death, “the most trusted man in America” has been embalmed in that most comforting of American sweeteners “” nostalgia “” to the point where his finest, and most discomforting, achievements are being sanitized or forgotten. We”ve heard much sentimental rumination on the bygone heyday of the “mainstream media,” on the cultural fractionalization inflicted by the Internet, and on the lack of any man who could replicate the undisputed moral authority of Uncle Walter. (Women still need not apply, apparently.) But the reason to celebrate Cronkite has little to do with any of this and least of all to do with his avuncular television persona. Continue reading “And That”s Not the Way It Is”