Daily Telegraph Falls For Michael Jackson Misinformation Experiment

On August 26, the Sydney Daily Telegraph ran the following piece of clickbait :



The original video and story was faked by German broadcaster RTL as "an experiment aimed at showing how quickly misinformation and conspiracy theories can race across the planet," according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

RTL ran the fake Michael Jackson video on YouTube for only 24 hours, and thank to clickbait media junkies like the Daily Telegraph, amassed more than 880,000 views before they pulled it down.

"We wanted to show how easily users can be manipulated on the internet with hoax videos," spokeswoman Heike Schultz of Cologne-based RTL told The Associated Press.

"Therefore, we created this video of Michael Jackson being alive, even though everybody knows by now that he is dead - and the response was breathtaking."

The Daily Telegraph story remains online, with no correction or updates explaining it had been suckered into a "misinformation experiment."

This is exactly the kind of celebrity story twaddle that Rupert Murdoch is expecting people to pay to read online by this time next year.

More Here

UPDATE : Looks like 'Hoax Or Real?' is going to become a standard Daily Telegraph clickbait feature.

Today's effort :



Pravda has plenty of these type of stories, but I get the feeling Daily Telegraph editors already know that.

UPDATE : Half a day as a feature story on the front page of the Daily Telegraph site (is nothing else happening in Sydney, or the world?), and the 'alien baby' story has only pulled a thin 4 comments. Didn't turn out to be quite the clickbait, or commentbait, it was expected to be, not even making the Daily Telegraph's Top Ten Stories list.

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Murdoch Media Jumps The Bullshit Shark In Michael Jackson Cash-In Frenzy

By Darryl Mason

News Ltd CEO John Hartigan defines the kind of quality journalism that he believes Australians will soon be paying to read online at Murdoch media sites :

It will have to be well researched, brilliantly written, perceptive and intelligent, professionally edited, accurate and reliable.

Quality will be defined as content that is original, useful, unavailable elsewhere and relevant.

I'm guessing then that in the Pay To Read future of Murdoch news sites that a story like this, from news.com.au yesterday, will be a freebie :



Media Watch takes a closer look at some of the Hartigan-praised Murdoch media "well researched, brilliantly written, perceptive and intelligent, professionally edited, accurate and reliable" stories that flowed across nearly all of Murdoch's Australian news sites, including the Daily Telegraph and the supposedly far more reputable The Australian, in the wake of Michael Jackson's death. All three stories have since been debunked by bloggers and not by the newspapers that originally published them :

Deborah Rowe Said Michael Jackson Children Aren't His
(The Daily Telegraph online, 29th June, 2009)

Jacko's Autopsy Results - Bald and a Skeleton
(The Daily Telegraph online, 29th June, 2009)

Jackson 'Overdosed Regularly'
(The Australian online, 29th June, 2009)

This is what the nanny, Grace Rwaramba, who a Murdoch fire starter falsely claimed regularly pumped Michael Jackson's stomach due to drug overdoses, had to say about the fabricated quotes published alongside her name on numerous Murdoch news sites and in just about every newspaper in the doom-speckled empire :

"The statements attributed to me confirm the worst in human tendencies to sensationalize tragedy and smear reputations for profit."

She'll never get a book deal with Harper Collins with that kind of talk.

But Grace Rwaramba was right, she nailed the truth, acutely. Tragedy was sensationalised and the profits are vast (if brief). As always. As has been the Golden Rule in the Murdoch media for almost 50 years.

For all of John Hartigan's pipe-and-tweeds aroma-soaked talk of the important role that "real journalists" and "quality journalism" plays in democratic society (and I couldn't agree more), making up shit to cash in on tragedy and horror and grief will always remain the essential core of Rupert Murdoch's profit margin.

"Well researched, brilliantly written, perceptive and intelligent, professionally edited, accurate and reliable" news stories....Well, who doesn't want all that in the newspapers we buy? And why does he need to point it out as some kind of aspirational? Shouldn't that already be the standard for all journalism?

The big problem for Hartigan is he knows better than most that it's the sensationalized tragedy and smearing of reputations-type stories that really shifts the newspaper bundles.

Used to shift those bundles, anyway.

Before the old business models of how to run a hugely, consistently profitable news corporation that maintained a semi-visible facade of self-respect, for the most part, turned to dust in the hands of Murdoch executives like John Hartigan.

But Hartigan would rather blame "the bloggers" than his own corporation's debasement of society for all those lost readers, and fast-fading profits.

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