India has just completed an independent Moon mission. In Bangladesh two newspapers just reported that the US Moon landings were faked.
The newspapers have already retracted their stories saying:
"We thought it was true so we printed it without checking," associate editor Hasanuzzuman Khan told the AFP news agency.
"We didn't know the Onion was not a real news site."
But how could they have had so little background knowledge that this would seem a story legitimate enough not to check?
Is it a matter of religion? India is mostly Hindu, Bangladesh almost entirely Islamic.
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M$2 Answers
That said I will give the Bangladeshi's a break in one sense. It must be hard for non native english speaker, especially one from a much different culture to detect that The Onion is entirely satirical. I'm glad they recognized their error and apologized.
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M$
Then I don't think we judge the whole country of Bangladesh because some lazy journalists couldn't be bothered to check the news source before going with it,
I don't think anyone considers either the religious background of America or its education standards to be a contributing factor for Forbes.
Both cases were incredibly funny though....
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That appears to have been a much more believable hoax, and it was caught almost immediately. A Chinese news agency sent out the release and only the name of the "state" was suspect. Not everyone has read the books or seen the movie. Also, the Onion page that the space hoax came from is full of absurd stories.
I completely agree with you... but you would expect journalists to recognise the fact that the country was one that didn't exist, even if they hadn't read the book, or any of its sequels or the tv series, or the films.
If the moon hoax was a 10 on the scale of stupidity then Forbe only scores an 9.5
"But how could they have had so little background knowledge that this would seem a story legitimate enough not to check?"
And its a lot easier to pull down a web page than recall a newspaper after a couple of hours.
