World affairs

Any of you familiar with US satirical news website The Onion will know that it should never be taken seriously. One Iranian news agency made that mistake.

In fairness to FARS, they’re not the first ones to have been duped by The Onion, but considering the subject matter of the story in question, surely they should have known better.

FARS, who have been described by Associated Press as the Iranian “semi-official” news agency, recently published a story originating from The Onion which claimed that the majority of rural white Americans would rather vote for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than Barack Obama.

FARS reproduced a word for word account of a story which first featured on the Onion website, which claimed that 77 per cent of rural Caucasian voters would rather go to a baseball game or have a drink with Ahmadinejad than Obama and included quotes from a fictional West Virginia resident such as: “He (Ahmadinejad) "takes national defence seriously, and he'd never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does."

The story has since been removed from the FARS website, but not before screengrabs (see above) were captured and went viral, marking yet another occasion when a story from The Onion fooled media outlets worldwide.

Past incidents where stories from the Onion were printed as fact included articles in two Bangladeshi newspapers in 2009 which claimed that the Moon landings were faked and a report on the Fox Nation website (part of the Fox News network) in 2010 that Barack Obama had written a 75,000-word e-mail complaining about America.

If those apocryphal tales weren’t enough for any news agency to thoroughly check their sources, a glance at the website today would quickly reveal that these guys aren’t exactly taking things too seriously.

Some of the headlines include ‘In tough economic times, this man had the courage to start his own business, which then failed’ and ‘Insurance company celebrates 50 billionth f**king  over of customer’.

We can’t wait until they claim their next victim.