The fake “NY Times” article confuses readers, as well as “NY Times” reporters
Bill Keller, former executive editor of The New York Times, tweeted Sunday that his name had been hijacked. In the fake NY Times article leaked, Bill Keller defends WikiLeaks and claims that the Obama administration has “gone too far” in targeting the controversial website.
The urgent tweet Keller released read, “THERE IS A FAKE OP-ED GOING AROUND UNDER MY NAME, ABOUT WIKILEAKS. EMPHASIS ON ‘FAKE.’ AS IN, NOT MINE.”
But readers were not the only people the fake NY Times article fooled. Even The New York Times’s own staff believed the fake NY Times article to be Keller’s own words of defense for WikiLeaks.
According to The Inquistr, some reporters were so surprised that they felt the need to tweet about the fake NY Times article, as well.
One reporter from The New York Times tweeted that the writer of the fake NY Times article extracted some of Keller’s actual words from an e-mail he sent to the reporter.
An excerpt media outlets have been highlighting includes these words: “You don’t have to embrace Assange as a kindred spirit to believe that what he did in publishing those cables falls under the protection of the First Amendment.”
But the e-mail emphasizes, “My point…that if WikiLeaks is subject to that kind of prosecution for publishing classified information, then the NYT or any other traditional media outlet is in danger of being prosecuted as well.”
Verbatim, Keller wrote, “I’ve said repeatedly, in print and in a variety of public forums, that I would regard an attempt to criminalize WikiLeaks’ publication of these documents as an attack on all of us, and I believe the mainstream media should come to his defense,” referring to Julian Assange, the mastermind of WikiLeaks.
According to Digital Journal, the fake NY Times article page looks legitimate enough. But if people look closely, they will notice a difference in URLs between the real New York Times website and the fake NY Times op-ed article web page. The original article URL should read, “nytimes.com/pages/opinion,” but instead reads, “opinion-nytimes.com”
The fake NY Times article is found at http://www.opinion-nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/keller-a-post-postscript.html.
