April Fool's and media hoaxes
The April Fool's Day hoax is a much under-appreciated news media institution. It has been 56 years since the BBC ran the famous fake report on its news documentary show "Panorama" about the spaghetti-growing trees in Switzerland, and news media have be
While some might see these harmless hoaxes lightly, as silly practical jokes, the April Fool’s spoofs can achieve much more than eliciting a laugh or satisfying the unfulfilled creative (or impish) ambitions of some journalists. First of all, a fictional, wacky piece of pseudo-reporting can hold a mirror to the strangeness of the real events.
The Taco Bell Corporation bought a full-page ad in The New York Times and other major US newspapers on April’s Fool Day 1996, claiming to have bought the Liberty Bell and renamed it the “Taco Liberty Bell”. Phone lines at the National Historic Park in Philadelphia, home to the famous bell, were jammed by calls from furious citizens for hours until the firm revealed the ads to be a practical joke.
Why did people buy that joke? Because the corporatisation of capitalist society has run so far that a food firm buying a piece of American history is at least imaginable.
In another satire-hoax news item, newsletter the New Mexicans for Science and Reason reported in April 1998 that the state legislature in Alabama had passed a law to change pi from 3.14159 to the “biblical value” of 3.0, in a parody of religion meddling in classroom affairs. Again, the hoax news report prompted hundreds of angry phone calls at the Alabama legislature.
April Fool’s hoaxes can also help illustrate what’s arguably the most important piece of information a newspaper can give to its readers: that just because a piece of information is printed in a newspaper does not necessarily make it true. Newspapers strive to provide unbiased, comprehensive and true information on domestic and world events to the public. But they also realise how limited they are by editorial errors, hidden truths and the simple human impossibility to know and present every single aspect of an event.
If a newspaper can only teach people one thing, it should teach them to question everything. It should teach them to use information from news outlets as a starting point in the quest for truth and understanding of the world, instead relying on the authorities to be told what’s true or not. The importance of educated questioning is a balanced attitude between willful refusals of all information and the lazy acceptance of all published information as facts.
With global information literally at their fingertips, technology-savvy denizens of the Internet age should have the best shot at eradicating rumours. Ironically, the Internet has turned out to be a supercharged rumour-spreading machine. In a widely reposted picture, the sentence “Don’t freely believe in the (authenticity of) famous quotes spread around on the Internet just because they are accompanied by photos of famous people – Hu Shih” appears beside the photo of the famous Chinese author. It serves as a poignant reminder of our gullibility, especially toward authorities, celebrities and titles.
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