Washington Post falls for hoax report that Sarah Palin will work for al-Jazeera
By: John Hayward
2/12/2013 11:10 AM
Suzi Parker at the Washington Post wrote on Tuesday morning, “The Sarah Palin Story is a cautionary tale about what can happen when politics and celebrity meet.”
There follow several hundred words of rambling non-news about how Palin is “trying to find ways to stay relevant while her 15 minutes faces into the political history books,” after parting ways with Fox News. Parker artfully juxtaposes some factoids about Palin’s popularity in Alaska, and unsupported speculation that she’s been ruined by exposure to reality TV, with an account of Palin’s attendance at the memorial for murdered Navy SEAL Chris Kyle – the implication being that Palin only attended the service to draw attention to herself.
But the marquee element of Parker’s post – the entire reason she wrote the silly, contemptuous piece – was the revelation that Palin would become a contributor for the TV network al-Jazeera bought from al-Gore. Supposedly Palin hoped to use her new perch at al-Jazeera to “reach millions of devoutly religious people.”
It’s a blockbuster revelation that turned out to be based entirely on a hoax… which Parker fell for hook, line, and sinker, apparently making no effort whatsoever to substantiate it, not even through the minimal practice of searching for a single corroborating source online. Parker’s sole source was an obvious parody site, the Daily Currant. She probably didn’t even bother to visit the site, instead building her story around a cut-and-paste of something she received via social media. At the time of this writing, the top story on the Daily Currant is “Catholic Church Considering Jerry Sandusky as Next Pope.”
Parker’s embarrassing piece now begins with one of the funniest “corrections” in journalistic history:
“An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that Sarah Palin planned to contribute to the Al Jazeera America news network.” The bogus material has been carefully clipped out, and the piece has been reworded to conceal how prominently it once figured in Parker’s writing, but here’s what it used to say:
Late last week Al Jazeera America announced the former vice-presidential candidate would be joining their news network.
“As you all know, I’m not a big fan of newspapers, journalists, news anchors and the liberal media in general,” Palin told the Web site The Daily Currant. “But I met with the folks at Al-Jazeera and they told me they reach millions of devoutly religious people who don’t watch CBS or CNN. That tells me they don’t have a liberal bias.”[