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seemslikeadream » Tue Feb 24, 2015 2:10 am wrote:Republican State Rep. Vito Barbier Thinks a Woman's Stomach is Connected to Her Vagina
http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/28/world/ira ... ncy-duped/
Iran's news agency portrays satirical Onion story as its own
By Michael Martinez, CNN
Updated 4:57 PM ET, Sat September 29, 2012
Iran's Fars News Agency posted a story based on The Onion, unaware it is a satirical fake news website.
Add Iran's news agency to the long list of those hoodwinked by the satire of The Onion.
Iran's semi-official Fars News Agency published a story Friday claiming that a Gallup poll found that rural white Americans prefer Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over President Barack Obama.
Such a poll would indeed be big news in Iran (and the United States) -- if it were true.
But the source was The Onion, the publication that presents the outlandish as real news.
Its serious tone fools many who are new to the lampoons. Onion yarns have tricked news outlets in the U.S. and overseas.
Ahmadinejad: I'm quite popular
What sets Fars apart from others, however, is that the agency published the Onion story as if it were its own.
Fars News Agency used the story verbatim, giving the same headline: "Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad To Obama"
Fars also took all the credit at the get-go:
"TEHRAN (FNA) -- According to the results of a Gallup poll released Monday, the overwhelming majority of rural white Americans said they would rather vote for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than US President Barack Obama."
(The Onion story used a Charleston, West Virginia, dateline.)
The article went on to quote a West Virginia resident as saying he would rather grab a ballgame or a drink with the Iranian leader than with Obama.
The phony resident then lauded Ahmadinejad: "He takes national defense seriously, and he'd never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does."
If that weren't enough, Fars continued, "According to the same Gallup poll, 60 percent of rural whites said they at least respected that Ahmadinejad doesn't try to hide the fact that he's Muslim."
A Fars news editor said Friday that the outlet took the item off its English-language website once editors realized that The Onion wasn't a legitimate news organization.
Without breaking from its farce, Onion Editor Will Tracy wrote in an e-mail that Fars is a subsidiary and has been "our Middle Eastern bureau since the mid 1980s, when the Onion's publisher, T. Herman Zweibel, founded Fars with the government approval of the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini.
"The Onion freely shares content with Fars and commends the journalists at Iran's Finest News Source on their superb reportage," Tracy wrote in his statement.
There's no word on whether either president is laughing.
Presidents have a tradition of leaving notes for each other as they pass the baton to the next leader of the free world, author Brad Meltzer tells Newsmax TV. Meltzer learned of the tradition when researching his new thriller "The President's Shadow."
President Ronald Reagan, when leaving the White House in 1989, wrote to George H.W. Bush, "Don't let the turkeys get you down," and slid it into the Oval Office desk.
Bush, in turn, left a note for Bill Clinton, who left a note for George W. Bush, who left a note for Barack Obama.
"It's the greatest hidden tradition of the modern presidency," Meltzer told "Newsmax Prime."
Meltzer said that during his research he asked former President George H.W. Bush if the messages were ever used to send coded information.
"The email comes back to me and it says, 'The president wants you to have this.' I don't know what it is, and I open it up, and President Bush had sent me the real letter that he left for Bill Clinton. No one had ever seen it before publicly, in fact, his own biographers were like, why didn't you give this to me?"
Meltzer said he checked for Freemason or other codes, but found none. "But it was just a generous, amazing letter that again spoke to humanity."
Meltzer wrote in the New York Post on Sunday that he also learned from the Secret Service that Reagan packed a pistol while president. He told Newsmax that no one knows whether he started carrying the the gun after the assassination attempt on him or if he had carried it from the day he was sworn in.
"The reason for that is because he said that if anyone else comes to shoot him, he wants to be ready," Meltzer said.
boomerdog » Fri Jun 19, 2015 2:25 pm wrote:I am surprised this hasn't been posted yet.
"White Supremacists Worried Charleston Shooting Makes Them Look Bad"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/1 ... 13540.html
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