NYT Ensnared by April Fool story meant to fool bloggers

[fossten]

Fake story meant to ensnare bloggers catches NYT instead

And these clowns wonder why they are circling the drain? This lawyer pulled the fake story stunt to entrap us – political bloggers – because “fact checking is not” our “strong suit,” so he claimed. We ignored the story, and the NYT ran with it.

Gawker’s got a post, which also covers another false story the NYT ran with – but this blog one is just so rich. Let’s go to the source.

New York Personal Injury Attorney Blog.com. Eric Turkewitz wrote in this blog that he had been appointed “official White House law blogger:

Since word is already dribbling out among my friends, I thought I should let you know here: I’m closing down this blog in the next few weeks to start up a new one at the White House as their official law blogger. I’ll have the opportunity to both expand the scope of my writing and serve my country at the same time. As blogging gigs go, it doesn’t get any better than that.

It’ a good ruse complete with charts and stories. So the NYT gets wind of it. Their “fact-checking” department calls both the lawyer and the White House. Lawyer specifically obfuscates; he confirms NOTHING. The WH? No one home. The story has no confirmation whatsoever on any level.

What does the NYT do? I can’t grab an archived version to link, but here is the cut from Gawker claiming to be the original NYT piece:

After all, as Mr. Turkewitz, a Manhattan lawyer, writes on his New York Personal Injury Law Blog, he is about to be sounding off on all manner of legal issues as the Obama administration’s new White House law blogger.

“Excited about new blogging gig as White House law blogger,” he tweeted this morning. “But hope I don’t have to spend too much time in D.C.”

Spoken like a true New Yorker.

And, alas, here’s the retraction:

[Note: an earlier version of this column had an item about a blog post by a personal-injury lawyer, Eric Turkewitz, announcing that he had been appointed the White House law blogger. Blogospheric chatter indicates a high likelihood that this post was an April Fool hoax. Mr. Turkewitz declined to give us a straight answer on this score, so, pending callback from the White House, we've taken the item down.]

Love the “blogospheric chatter” crack. I think it is called “vetting” or “fact checking.”

And as if it couldn’t get better. The lawyer turns out to be smug prick that learned something he probably didn’t want to know:

The basic idea was this: A bunch of law bloggers would try to punk the political bloggers, whose reputation is to grab any old rumor and run with it. Fact checking hasn’t always been the strong suit of this community.

But the political bloggers, to their collective credit, didn’t bite, despite wide dissemination of the story. Not on the right or the left. Instead it was the vaunted New York Times that ran with the story without bothering to check its facts. The Times, of course, had no sense of humor about it when the angry phone call came to me a couple of hours later.

So, he tried to punk us and instead found out that what we’ve been saying about the NYT has been true all along.

So funny.