BRATTLEBORO — Another April Fools' Day has come and gone, and thanks to social media like Facebook, it's never been easier to be fooled by more people.
I have to admit that I fell for a friend's post that he bumped into George Clooney at a coffee shop in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. It was just detailed enough and odd enough that the long story had a great ring of credibility to it. No harm, no foul - it was all in good fun.
Similarly, countless friends pretended to be pregnant with varying degrees of credibility, though I had to arch an eyebrow when the friend who just celebrated her 50th birthday made the breathless announcement at 11:50 p.m. Again, some good jokes.
And I do find all this fakery all in good fun up to a point.
For me, that point is where legitimate news organizations start participating and creating fake news stories for the occasion.
* * *
Reasonable people can disagree on the issue.
“I do think that trust and integrity are important, and because of that I do believe that joke columns should only be allowed on April 1st, and that they have to be very well written,” one of my particularly smart, sane, and funny friends posted on Facebook when I complained about an increase in this factual horseplay. “That said, it's of value to have our routine shaken up from time to time.”
Fair point. And I would have agreed wholeheartedly a few years ago.
That would have been at the last newspaper I edited. I was just handing over the editorial reins, and my successor wanted to do an April Fools' edition.
We carefully worked to make the fakery visually distinct from the rest of the newspaper, running it as an ad buried deep inside the paper. We put a large headline on the page that said something to the effect of, “This is a joke! Enjoy it!”
And I thought it would be a beautiful way to handle it.
The lead story of this joke page was the sale of the local food co-op to McDonald's, complete with an over-the-top digitally manipulated photo that added the golden arches to the top of the Victorian-era building.
And the next week, I went in there to buy a cup of coffee.
“You know, seven people called here in a panic last week,” the deli manager told me. “They thought it was a real story.”
However much you think your readers are paying attention, you can't assume that all readers will be reading thoroughly.
I assumed that something that was labelled so clearly and was so patently ridiculous couldn't possibly be taken seriously. I was wrong.
This media adventure made enough of an impression on me that I will never run a fake news story in this or any other paper as an April Fools' Day joke.
Ever.
* * *
This year, I've noticed more April-foolery from newspapers than I've encountered in years past.
“Forbes blogger Len Burman's April Fools' Day story, headlined 'Romney Drops Out of Race, Endorses Santorum,' was yanked after it showed up on Google News as a legitimate news story,” media-watcher Jim Romenesko reported on his journalism blog.
Readers of The Daily Free Press at Boston University might not have believed that Cinderella and her stepsisters were actually members of a prostitution ring, but the fake story was accused of perpetuating a “rape culture” on campus, the paper had to issue an apology, and the editor resigned in disgrace this week.
Thanks to the stellar fake journalism of a 2,000-circulation paper in Wisconsin, the state's Department of Natural Resources had to do its own damage control.
“The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources wants to assure the public that the DNR is not selling the Elroy-Sparta State Trail to Disney, as reported earlier today in an April Fools' prank by The County Line newspaper in Ontario,” the agency's press release said.
The crowning touch for me this year was NPR, which broadcast a fake interview and published a fake web report, “N.Y. Preschool Starts DNA Testing For Admission,” which - at least online, where I saw it - required a most discerning eye to see that it wasn't real.
I spent a good five minutes being incredulous about the details of the story. I spent a good five minutes being blown away by the cultivation of over-the-top elitism. I spent a good five minutes being outraged on Facebook and sharing the story all over the place.
And then a friend pointed out gently that it was a joke.
I know it was only 15 minutes of my life, but I want those 15 minutes back.
All of them.
* * *
There's no honor in duping the very readers who would actually be most likely to believe satirical news - the very readers who earnestly trust what we have to say.
We want to choose our stories carefully and tell them well. We will inevitably find great stories that are great, in part, because they are wholly unbelievable. So when our best stories are those that have some of the very same characteristics of the best fake news articles you can publish, it's not surprising that some readers - even careful readers - actually fall for the fake news.
For me and my colleagues, this newspaper is central to who we are, and it's not a joke. There's a time and a place for our abundant humor: as commentary or satire or other material in the Voices section, or as a well-written and witty news feature. When we run something funny, it will be funny in a way that brings readers in on a joke, not in a way that makes readers themselves the butt of one.
We spend so much of our time building our stories and building the confidence of our sources, earning their trust and earning their readership. It's a relationship that is so very fragile. It takes so long to build, and one misstep for any reason can destroy it in a blink of an eye.
At a time when newspapers are losing circulation and competing, at a time when reportage is blurring daily with entertainment and demagoguery, the very last thing that we need to be doing is publishing anything whose objective is to fool our readers into thinking that something fake is actually real.
If given the opportunity, I would ask one simple question to the people at NPR, Forbes, and all these other media outlets whose weeks were complicated by unexpected fallout from their April Fools' Day dispatches.
Was it really worth it?