Wired News: Onion Taken Seriously, Film at 11
April 14, 2004
By Daniel Terdiman
Wired News

The article in the Beijing Evening News told a shocking story of American hubris: Congress was behaving like a petulant baseball team and threatening to bolt Washington, D.C., unless it got a new, modern Capitol building, complete with retractable roof.

There was a problem with the story. Rather than do his own original reporting, Evening News writer Huang Ke had cribbed, nearly word for word, his text from an American publication. And as if that wasn't bad enough, he hadn't bothered to vet the source he had plagiarized: The Onion.

At first, the Evening News stood by its story, demanding proof it wasn't true. It finally did apologize, but stubbornly tried to deflect blame for having been duped.

It wrote: "Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them with the aim of making money."

Carol Kolb, the editor of The Onion, the satirical publication that bills itself as "America's Finest News Source," jokes that the Evening News might not have been too far off-base with its defense.

"That's what we do at The Onion," she laughs. "We do print lies to make money."

Article continued at http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,63048,00.html

it's funny because it's true