Fooling journalists is funny … if you like dark humor

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There's a long history of imposter sources fooling journalists, such as this supposed cleaner for Britain's Royal Family.

buckingham palace says no named ANNE SIMMONS ever worked there.

Oh what must thousands of Royal Family fans around the world have thought when they realized – gasp – that Kate Middleton’s morning beauty routine actually isn’t five easy steps.

Multiple outlets in the UK and the US published the princess’s hair and makeup secrets, as revealed by Buckingham Palace staff member Anne Simmons in press releases sent to those outlets. Two weeks ago, those stories got retracted. Anne Simmons doesn’t exist.

Hoaxes like this aren’t new but the danger may be worse these days because there no longer are limits on lying, grifting and hating the news media. The Simmons case is exceptionally flabbergasting because outlets lazily accepted press releases (including a photo!) from a PR firm and never interviewed the supposed royal staff member.

Here are some other high-profile cases from the past few years of intentional misrepresentation of identity that succeeded. And the duped reporters were in direct communication with the imposter. You’re welcomed to chuckle as you go. They’re funny in a schadenfreude sort of way.

  • Fortune magazine published an online story in January that said Elon Musk planned to charge a fee to sign up for X and would remove timestamps from posts. Fortune deleted the story and apologized after learning that its anonymous source was not a fired X engineer as he had claimed but instead was a malicious prankster making the whole thing up.

  • CNN showed an unplanned video of its reporter discovering a man still in a Damascus prison cell after the fall of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad last year. The man, who seemed shocked by the news of his sudden freedom, said he was a civilian imprisoned for three months by the Assad regime. Turns out, he gave a false identity and actually was an intelligence officer for the Assad government who had gotten himself into prison over a dispute with a superior officer. CNN corrected its report.

  • For his channel on X, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson video recorded a hot exclusive with the digital content creator for Kensington Palace, who said he was fired for doing a poor job of discreetly manipulating the infamous Kate Middleton Mother’s Day photo last year. Exactly none of that was true. The man was a well-known YouTube prankster. He even fabricated an employment contract that fooled the Tucker Carlson Network, which failed to notice a clause about the palace’s right to amputate a limb if the man failed his probationary period. The imposter did fess up before the interview was shown. (OK, full-blown laughter is allowed on this one. It’s Tucker Carlson, after all.)

this man was not who he claimed to be. But cnn figured that out too late.

  • As part of a 2023 expose on U.S. companies illegally employing migrant child labor, NBC News and Telemundo broadcast an interview with a Kansas slaughterhouse worker. They gave him a pseudonym, disguised his voice and put his face in shadow. They also took his word that he was 16. Documents in Guatemala – sought out only after the broadcast – showed him to be 21. The outlets retracted.

  • CNBC and multiple other national and local news outlets reported that Musk had begun employee layoffs on his first day as owner of Twitter in 2022. They interviewed two men – holding boxes of office supplies outside the building – who said they’d just been let go from their data engineer jobs. Twitter employees began contacting the outlets to say they’d never seen those guys before. The reporters failed to become dubious even when one of the men identified himself as “Rahul Ligma.”

  • In 2020, The Washington Post took down a posted story about an FBI raid at a local residence. It was actually actors hired by two right-wing political activists with a history of media pranks.

  • The New York Times retracted the essence of its 2019 Pulitzer finalist podcast “Caliphate,” which centered on tales told by a radicalized Canadian who joined ISIS and participated in terrorist executions in Syria. Except he didn’t kill anyone, never joined ISIS and hadn’t even been to Syria.

  • A Boston Herald columnist was suspended in 2018 after reporting that New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady might hold out because of a salary dispute. The columnist’s source turned out to be a fan impersonating Brady’s agent.

Not to excuse these sources’ bad behavior, but fault always belongs to the journalists because of the automatic responsibility that comes with the decision to publish. And in almost all cases, there are ways for journalists to discover the deceit if they make the effort. In a high-profile case in Alabama in 2017, for instance, a Washington Post reporter was not suckered into believing a woman’s false story that U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore had gotten her pregnant when she was a teenager.

Journalists need to be skeptical about almost everything these days. Because yeah, there are people out to get you. And you need to be wary of the potential deadly blindness that can come from falling in love with your seemingly sensational story that actually isn’t.