Quotations (23)

Bunk

the Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-facts, and Fake News
1 to 23 of 23 items
Only posted from more recently reported tall tales or worse (AND PLEASE DON'T READ THE QUOTES IF YOU FEAR SPOILERS:) You could say that 2016 gave us an election without a winner (or a popular winner didn’t win). === With the hoax more…
The hoax involving the Holocaust, especially once it’s revealed, often becomes kitsch at best, schlock at worst. Survivor Ruth Klüger calls Holocaust fakes, once revealed, kitsch: “A passage is shocking perhaps precisely because of its…
It isn’t that the contemporary hoax provides “a different kind of truth” but that it offers far less. A whole lie would almost be welcome, but hoaxes won’t extend us the courtesy of respecting the truth enough to betray it. Instead, we…
Apart from money, and fame, the fabulist’s true motive is a strange combination of getting away with it and getting caught, hinting all along. === Like Clifford Irving before them, both Glass and notorious New York Times fabulist Jayson…
The New Republic may have had no racial difficulties simply because for decades it had been all-white. === Joe McGinniss, perhaps best known more recently for moving next door to Sarah Palin in order to write a book about her. In Malcolm’s…
When friend is merely a verb, not a person; when apocalypses too are computer based and costly, like Y2K, then turn out to be mostly paranoia, or worse, marketing; when you can fall in love not with television or through television but on…
Eady’s “My Heart”: Susan Smith has invented me because Nobody else in town will do what She needs me to do. I mean: Jump in an idling car And drive off with two sad and Frightened kids in the back. Like a bad lover, she has given me…
Janet Cooke, a young reporter with a star résumé. Her front-page story “Jimmy’s World” about a young heroin addict got widespread attention; that Sunday’s issue shipped almost a million copies, with the news service syndicating the article…
The journalistic hoaxer, like the travel liar of the eighteenth century, finds “abroad” what he or she already thinks. === The reporter, Jayson Blair, 27, misled readers and Times colleagues with dispatches that purported to be from…
“Judith Miller began a run of stories that repeatedly took Bush administration and Iraqi exile claims about [Saddam] Hussein’s WMD capabilities at face value. The problem was, those stories and others like them weren’t breaking news, they…
Tabloids print urban legends as fact; what should be called fabloid television’s “Rumor Watch” and “True or False” segments allow fake news shows to repeat a rumor as they go on to debunk it. Such rumors-as-reporting have now become…
Take soldier Jessica Lynch: she really was captured in Iraq and then rescued, but she was never shot or wounded as initially reported as a justification for that rescue; she soon later became used by military and news outlets as a sign of…
Being black is not a feeling. I don’t always feel colored. Nor is it simply a state of mind. Blackness: a way of being. === This morning I woke from a “deep Negro sleep,” as Léopold Senghor put it. I then took a black shower and shaved a…
For Clark Rockefeller it would all seem a game, not just Clue but Trivial Pursuit. It is that late 1980s parlor-room staple that then-Christopher Chichester invites folks over to play near a mound of dirt—which, it has become clear since,…
HOWGIH (How Opal Will Get Into Harvard) for HOWGAL (How Opal Will Get A Life). === New York Times reported, “The Crimson cited 13 instances in which Ms. Viswanathan’s book closely paralleled Ms. McCafferty’s work. But there are at least 29…
As Conning Harvard details, Wheeler started in 2005 with small but selective Bowdoin College, whose college application he completed almost entirely with plagiarized material; after two years, just as he was about to be exposed, he…
Noted impostors like faker James Hogue, as detailed in David Samuels’s The Runner, actually earned good grades after getting into Princeton under false pretenses; his desire seemed to be both to run track and to run from his past. === In…
Melania Trump had said of the speech “I wrote it myself” with as “little help as possible.” This may prove a white lie—a bit like a hostess saying she cooked everything when she merely heated dishes to specifications—to match her…
By not properly quoting or not claiming influence, plagiarists have more or less implied they alone—not the works they reportedly love—are orphaned. As a result, plagiarism doesn’t just express anxieties of paternity but is both…
The hoax’s haunting history of race was invoked by the likes of candidate Trump familiar as a figure of horror: fake Indians, Mexican rapists, violent Negroes and their neighborhoods, invisible Asians. === It isn’t so much that President…
A poorer propaganda, the hoax is actually all the more effective for appearing amateurish. Plagiarism does much the same. If I were a true plagiarist, it seems to say, wouldn’t I have made my theft less obvious? If I were lying, wouldn’t I…
To call this a swindle is almost to admire it. The effort is so complete, its effects and hubris so unapologetic, and it must be said now, effective—from not releasing taxes to admitting to a billion dollars in debt (which his supporters…
I preferred “fake news” when it was simply called propaganda. These days it is not so much belief that inspires the crowd—though it never was exactly in Barnum’s day either, reliant on wonder or plain curiosity. Whether that’s falsely…