All About Pranks - The Art of the Prank

May 2, 2007January 15, 2019

How false information creates true events

From monochrom: An article by Klaus Schoenberger — who is doing pop-culture research at the University of Hamburg, Germany — featuring the Yes Men and their Union Carbide/Bhopal hoax in 2004.

Activists use fakes and hoaxes to communicate information by speaking in the name of someone else – persons or institutions invested with power. With the spreading of Internet communication, this pattern of action and communicating has acquired additional power as a means of political and social protest. Within the framework of Guerrilla Communication, with its specific understanding of politics, faking develops into an efficient form of political articulation.

Read the entire article here.

Editor’s note: See also April Media Fools, March 30, 2005, by Rory O’Connor for MediaChannel.org

April 25, 2007January 15, 2019

Coyle & Sharpe: The Imposters Podcasts, Episode 5

Here’s The Ashtray, episode 5 of the historic Coyle & Sharpe podcast series presented by Jesse Thorn of The Sound of Young America. In this episode, Coyle & Sharpe discuss with a New Zealander the possibility of growing an ashtray out of his forehead.

Listen to episodes 1, 2 & 3 here and episode 4 here. New episodes will be posted each Wednesday as they are released by The Sound of Young America.

These recordings are from the Sharpe family archive, tended by Mal’s daughter, Jennifer Sharpe. More about Coyle & Sharpe is available on their Website or on MySpace.

You can also listen to this podcast at The Sound of Young America or you can subscribe to the series in iTunes.

April 25, 2007January 15, 2019

A hoax interview about a hoax movie about a hoax book

Caveat emptor: Robert Hilferty, critic for Bloomberg News talked with Clifford Irving about “The Hoax” movie. Irving also writes about the movie (which he says he has not seen) on his Web site, where you can download a pdf version of “The Autobiography of Howard Hughes”. A few chapters are free. The whole book is $5.95 which he says, “is a discount of $154 from the Amazon.com price,” although as of today, the book is unavailable on Amazon.com.

Clifford Irving Faked Hughes Book for Fun, Derides ‘Hoax’ Film
By Robert Hilferty

April 25 (Bloomberg) — Clifford Irving, who spent more than a year in prison after writing a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes in the 1970s, says the new Richard Gere film about the hoax is also phony.

“From the first time I read the script, I thought it was a silly, defamatory story about a crackpot, desperate man who by some coincidence bears the same name as mine,” Irving, 76, said last week in a telephone interview from his home in Aspen, Colorado. The movie is supposedly based on his own account, “The Hoax,” written before he went to jail.

Hilferty: Do you consider the “The Autobiography of Howard Hughes” to be your masterpiece?

Irving: No. It’s just a very good book. I’ve written better books, but the autobiography is unique insofar as it is a novel in the form of an autobiography. It’s the most famous unpublished book in America.

Hilferty: It certainly took a lot creativity to make up those conversations.

Irving: We didn’t make them up. We actually had the conversations. My friend Dick Suskind and I set a Sony tape recorder on the table and we’d switch playing the roles of Howard Hughes and Clifford Irving. We got into it as actors. Continue reading “A hoax interview about a hoax movie about a hoax book”

April 24, 2007January 15, 2019

A True History of Fake News

Jon Stewart’s parody news show may make him “the most trusted name in fake news,” but these days it “comes at us from every quarter of the media,” writes journalism professor Robert Love — “not just as satire but disguised as the real thing, secretly paid for by folks who want to remain in the shadows. And though much of it is clever, it’s not all funny.” Love recounts some of the memorable frauds that have filled newspaper pages in the past: the New York Sun‘s Great Moon Hoax of 1835, Mark Twain’s “petrified man,” and H.L. Mencken’s fabricated 75th anniversary of the bathtub. More recently, he notes, video news releases and pundits-for-hire like Armstrong Williams have ushered in an era where new technologies make it “easier to deliver the news and also easier to fake it,” while “falling circulation, diminishing news budgets, and dismantled staffs” have given “third-party players — government, industry, politicians, you name ’em — sleeker weapons and greater power to turn the authority of the press to their own ends: to disseminate propaganda, disinformation, advertising, politically strategic misinformation — to in effect use the media to distort reality.”

Website: Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 2007

URL: http://www.cjr.org/issues/2007/2/Love.asp

Originally from Center for Media and Democracy – Publishers of PR Watch on April 21, 2007

April 24, 2007January 15, 2019

David Halberstam, 1934-2007

We mourn the loss of a crusader for truth. The following excerpts are from the Associated Press – JS

Author David Halberstam Dies in Crash
By Lisa Leff
Associated Press
April 23, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who chronicled the Vietnam War generation, civil rights and the world of sports, was killed in a car crash Monday, his wife and local authorities said. He was 73.

Halberstam, of New York, was a passenger in a car that was broadsided by another vehicle in Menlo Park, south of San Francisco, San Mateo County Coroner Robert Foucrault said. The cause of death appeared to be internal injuries, he said.

The accident occurred around 10:30 a.m., and Halberstam was declared dead at the scene, Menlo Park Fire Chief Harold Schapelhouman said.

The driver of the car carrying Halberstam and the person driving the car that crashed into his were injured, but not seriously…

In an interview earlier this month with The Associated Press, Halberstam recalled the zeal with which he and his colleagues covered Vietnam.

“Maybe we were 28, 29, 26 and we had a great story, which we knew and we had a lock on the truth because we had such great sources. When for a variety of reasons – a flawed, deeply flawed policy – the government starts lying, that is when independent journalism really matters,” he said.

Such reporting, he said, is a key component of democracy.

“The idea that somewhere before it is a big story that there is some young person… putting themselves on the line morally, ethically, journalistically, that is a great thing,” Halberstam said. “I mean, that is what a free society is about.”

Read the whole AP story here.