Boston Globe Re-Evaluating Relationship With Content Provider After False Krugman Post

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The Boston Globe on Monday said it is re-evaluating its relationship with a financial news content provider after an article based on satire ended up on Boston.com.

The post — based an a report in Austria’s Format online magazine, which in turn referenced a satirical article by The Daily Currant — claimed economist Paul Krugman was filing for bankruptcy and showed up on the site in an automatic financial news feed. Ellen Clegg, the Globe’s executive director of communications, explained the situation to TPM:

“The post about Paul Krugman was an automatic feed on a partner website called financialcontent.com. And Boston.com uses them to provide stock and other financial data on an automatic feed. So we worked to get it taken down as soon as we heard about it from readers early this morning. The story didn’t originate with the Globe or Boston.com. It was an automatic feed deep in the website. We asked (the site) to give us more information as to how this story got added to their financial news feed.”

Clegg added, “We’re trying to find out more about what happened, and reevaluating our relationship with the vendor.” Breitbart.com also picked up the story. The conservative news site has since taken down the post.

Krugman responded to satirical story on his blog:

On Friday I started hearing from friends about a fake story making the rounds about my allegedly filing for personal bankruptcy; I even got asked about the story by a reporter from Russian television, who was very embarrassed when I told him it was fake. But I decided not to post anything about it; instead, I wanted to wait and see which right-wing media outlets would fall for the hoax.

 

And Breitbart.com came through!

The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple has screen shots of the Boston.com and Breitbart versions.

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