On our website on Saturday April 1 we published an April Fool’s story. Headlined “Mount Isa to return to Northern Territory in border revision plan” it was a story by “Alan Border” purporting to reveal a plan seen by the North West Star where the westernmost part of Queensland from the Gulf to the South Australian border could return to the NT. In case anyone is still under any misapprehension, that story was false. There is no such plan and those that followed the plan’s link in the story were rickrolled.
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Many other details were false or invented. There is no journalist Alan Border. There is no such Professor “Hugh Jerar” (a huge error, surely) or is there any “Grating Institute”. There is no plan to rename Mt Isa to NT Isa and there is no constitutional crisis over Queensland’s western border (though the bit about the west being added to Queensland in 1862 three years after the rest in 1859 is true). The map we printed where Queensland’s step-like western border is turned into a straight line was semi-false – it was the original 1859 map but it was dodgied up (with five minutes of poor Paint skills) to show a fictional Mount Isa in an equally fictional “NT” (it was still NSW at the time). However the giveaway is Queensland and the NT agreeing to the proposal. It’s hard to imagine two governments agreeing on anything.
At the end of the day, I added an editor’s note. “Sorry/Not Sorry” it read, and a clarification. “This article was not written by the cricketer. He is ‘Allan Border’”. Our fake news was funny and while the serious tone (or reading the headline only) fooled some , almost everyone enjoyed the joke.
However no more like that. Fake news is fraught with hazard especially in 2017. Last year Macedonian youths made a lot of money when they invented shocking stories to gain large advertising revenue. They were exposed within days but millions believed the fiction. Donald Trump profited from that fiction then turned fake news on its head when he attached it to media giving him a hard time. The fake fake news practice has quickly spread across the world as a way to dismiss news you don’t like. Even truth itself has become muddied by “truthiness” and “alternative facts”.
We’ll stick to real news - at least until April 1, 2018. DB
Derek Barry
Editor of the North West Star Mount Isa since January 2016. Prior to that, an editor at several regional southern Queensland newspapers. Passionate about telling local stories. Comes with a strange accent to due an Irish accident of birth.
Editor of the North West Star Mount Isa since January 2016. Prior to that, an editor at several regional southern Queensland newspapers. Passionate about telling local stories. Comes with a strange accent to due an Irish accident of birth.
