Libya, and Syria were beatified?
In late 2005, the Daily Egyptian, the student newspaper at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and the Chicago Tribune, each uncovered a story that seemed like a pretty big deal at the time:
For more than two years, a student at SIUC had hoaxed people all over southern Illinois, including reporters at the Daily Egyptian, into believing the story of a family friend, a little girl named Kodee Kennings, whose father, Kodee said, was serving in Iraq.
There were several stories written about the girl, one editor gave her an occasional column for a semester, the girl visited the newsroom on several occasions and talked to reporters on the phone many times. Carbondale’s city paper, The Southern Illinoisan wrote a story. The girl, along with the student posing as her guardian, appeared in front of church and community groups to tell her story. The girl’s father, Dan Kennings, home on leave, visited the newsroom with his daughter once.
Except none of it was true. The student made the whole thing up, recruited the little girl (and the man who portrayed her father) to “play a part” in front of “hidden cameras”.
The hoax was revealed when the student claimed the father had died and set up a memorial service. The student paper and the Chicago Tribune – alerted to the still-believed-as-true story because of the death – finally looked into it and found there was no soldier named Dan Kennings. The rest of the story soon fell apart.
On Friday, August 26, the Tribune and the Egyptian broke the news of the hoax (the Egyptian apologized and retracted all its articles by or about either Kennings).
The AP wrote an article that appeared in the New York Times. Articles appeared in newspapers all over the region over the weekend, and the Daily Egyptian’s then-editor (who was not the editor at the time the hoax was going on), was slated to go on national morning TV shows to talk about the hoax at the beginning of the next week.
Except a bigger story brewed over the weekend – on the morning of Monday, August 29, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans.
wow Garfield226, you may have just won the thread
This is a story on a smaller scale, and a different genre, of news.
In 2007 I won a minor but unusually popular literary award, and the story was the top fluff news story in America, possibly the world, for about 2 weeks.
Then came the monkey.
A diaper-wearing monkey that appeared out of nowhere in downtown Madison, WI, bit a diner at a restaurant, and disappeared never AFAIK to be seen again. Leno mentioned it. Letterman mentioned it. And all the newspapers that had run stories about me and even called to interview me were swept up in diaper monkey mania. That lasted even a briefer time than I did in the headlines (well, neither of us were actually headline news, but you get my drift) but I never got mentioned again, except in some monthly periodicals on a slower news cycle.
Later I tried to sell NPR an a commentary about being knocked off as king of the fluff news mountain by a monkey, but they weren’t interested.
August 18 2005 Tornados out break in Wisconsin.
Stoughton is hit hard. Officials on national news tell people not to send relief yet as it’s not organized to receive it.
August 29 2005 Katrina does in New Orleans.
On behalf of victims of disasters I would like to say officials need to never say don’t send aid yet. The victims need it when the aid is offered not when the officials are organized to receive it and the victims are the ones to lose out. You wait and the next disaster gets the attention and aid. It happens every disaster that the new one gets the focus and the relief coming in. You luck out if you’re not the most prominent place in the media that got hit at the same time. The popular place gets the volunteers that help clean up, the other places drop through the cracks.
I had one friend who lost his home in Stoughton, but among many strangenesses related to that tornado, somebody found and returned his marriage license, which had blown away during the storm. They found it in their back yard, in a western suburb of Milwaukee, about a hundred miles away. And a bunch of other stuff from Stoughton, including one of those inflatable children’s wading pools, all rained down in that same area a hundred miles to the east.
Another friend had houses on both sides of her and across the street destroyed, but hers was untouched.
And OBL’s death also caused the Canadian elections to be relegated to the background.
The host of records Adam and Eve set at the very first olympics were quickly overshadowed by all that unpleasantness with the forbidden fruit.
Yesterday Newt Gingrich announces for Presidency on the front page of The New York Times; today on the front page of The New York Times Microsoft buys Skype.
That’s the news cycle for ya, Newt.