Interesting to note that the cost of Amy Winehouse’s boob job has apparently gone from £35,000 to only £5,000, according to the latest re-writing of history by the Daily Mail.
I love that they will write utterly sensationalist and non-fact-based stories, then totally ignore them a few weeks later. Seriously, the £35k story was written on October 12th, yet a mere 15 days later the price is now a seventh of what it was then.
I’d say that you couldn’t make this kind of shit up, but it’s pretty damn evident that they did.
Oh, and Amy Winehouse really is a mess, isn’t she?
Documentary-makers hoax newspapers with fake celebrity gossip stories
This is probably the best thing I’ve read all week. I tend to take tabloid newspapers in their entirety with a massive pinch of salt, and within that celebrity gossip pages are the absolute worst.
These guys (Starsuckers) decided to plant fake (but somewhat believable) stories by ringing the “Got a story?” hotlines printed in various British tabloid newspapers. Inevitably, these stories made it to print without any fact-checking at all by the journalists, even though they were barely credible.
My favourite is:
Atkins said the team’s greatest success was a fictional account about Sarah Harding, of the pop group Girls Aloud, published in the Sun’s flagship gossip section, Bizzare, on 2 April.
A Starsuckers researcher called the Sun pretending to be “Karys”, the wife of a removal man who had recently helped the singer move home. The reporter was told Harding owned a number of books on quantum physics and a telescope. “Maybe she’s really into astronomy or something, I dunno,” she said.
The Sun’s story, headlined “Sarah’s a real boffin”, claimed Harding was a “secret stargazer” who reads “mind-boggling books about astronomy and quantum physics”. It also contained a quote from “a source”, which, the Atkins team insists, did not come from them.
“There’s a lot more going on under that blonde barnet than Sarah’s given credit for,” the Sun’s source said. “She’s a smart cookie and does read an awful lot.”
Within hours, news of Harding’s apparent penchant for astronomy had spread across the internet, from the online site of Cosmopolitan magazine to Ankara, where the news was reported in Turkish Weekly.
So not only did the Sun print a made-up story from an anonymous tip-off, but they went further and just made up a quote from a completely different “source”. Incredible stuff.
I know that even when true these stories are fluff, but it’s a great example of what Nick Davies calls “churnalism”, which is bringing down the quality of journalism as a whole.
