One Giant Oops For Bangladeshi News

It should have been the biggest story of the decade - proof that the Moon landings in 1969 were in fact an elaborate hoax. The problem for Bangladesh's Daily Manab Zamin and New Nation newspapers was the source - the satirical American newspaper/website The Onion.

This week, The Onion ran one of their usual funny faux news stories: "Conspiracy Theorist Convinces Neil Armstrong Moon Landing Was Faked." In it Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, says he was convinced that the landing was fake after reading blog posts from a moon landing conspiracy theorist and admitted that he mis-remembered the events of July 1969.

The Daily Manab Zamin newspaper stumbled across The Onion story without realizing it was a joke, translated it into Bengali and ran it as front page news. The story was then picked up by the New Nation the next day. Hasanuzzuman Khan, associate editor at the Daily Manab Zamin, later admitted his paper's error and ran an apology. "We thought it was true so we printed it without checking," Khan said.

Of course checking your sources is Journalism 101. You can forgive the folks in far off Bangladesh for not knowing that The Onion was a joke newspaper (well one that's intentionally a joke, not like the New York Post say), but didn't they think that such a huge story would be the lead on a major news source like CNN or the BBC? The lesson for the Bangladesh news corps - always get two sources (some more J-school 101 knowledge).