CNN anchor Anderson Cooper kept himself honest on Monday night, confessing that he had been duped the fake news site Clickhole last month.
“I didn’t know what ClickHole was,” Cooper said. “I mean how am I supposed to keep up with what the kids are doing?”
The moment came in the middle of a segment in which Cooper mocked ex-FIFA vice president Jack Warner for confusing an article from The Onion for an actual news report.
It didn’t take long for the CNN anchor to admit he was the pot calling the kettle black.
On May 18, Cooper spied a fake quote attributed to him in a Clickhole article, in which he advised recent graduates that obtaining a degree is “bigger than getting a hole-in-one while golfing.” He took action.
Ummm… @Clickhole, do u make this stuff up? I never said this quote and never spoke to the NYU class of 2015. https://t.co/oRSDgpQXxx
— Anderson Cooper (@andersoncooper) May 18, 2015
“I tweeted, ‘do you make this stuff up?’” he said. “Which of course, as it turns out, yeah, they do. Because that’s their job, since they are a parody site owned by The Onion.”
“So, maybe I shouldn’t throw stones at the FIFA guy,” Anderson concluded.
I have fallen for similar stuff. I really like Anderson. At least he has the good sense to come back and tell about it. Kind of ironic that it followed him chuckling over the other guy falling for annOnion article, though.
Aaaah, the Interconnectedness of All Things…
“I didn’t know what ClickHole was,” Cooper said. “I mean how am I supposed to keep up with what the kids are doing?”
Well, you can start by checking your sources. From what I understand that’s something journalists used to do.
The difference being that Cooper read an unbelievable Clickhole article and complained it was false, but the FIFA guy read an unbelievable Onion article and believed it to be true.
In his defense, the real news these days is often indistinguishable from parody. I mean, have you listened to what the G.O.P. Presidential hopefuls have been saying lately?
This presents a real challenge for publications like The Onion. How do you parody something that’s already absurd?
I fell for a fake news story that quoted Mitt Romney as saying he was too important to go to Vietnam. I was outraged for about 5 minutes and it finally dawned on me when I couldn’t find the quote on any reputable news site.