Iranian semi-official Fars News Agency plagiarized a story by U.S. satirical publication, The Onion, on Friday before realizing it was a fake, CNN reported. The story used claimed that a Gallup poll found that "rural whites" overwhelmingly preferred Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over President Barack Obama.
According to CNN, Fars published the story verbatim and passed it off as its own, even using The Onion's headline, "Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad To Obama." The Iranian news agency only took the time to change the story's dateline, but not to verify its contents before publishing it on its website.
The bogus story quoted a West Virginia resident, who said that he would "much rather go to a baseball game or have a drink with Ahmadinejad then spend time with Obama." The made-up source, named Dale Swiderski, even went as far as to say, "He [Ahmadinejad] takes national defense seriously, and he'd never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does."
CNN reported that Fars also wrote, "According to the same Gallup poll, 60 percent of rural whites said they at least respected that Ahmadinejad doesn't try to hide the fact that he's Muslim."
Once the news agency discovered it had been tricked, it immediately removed the story from its website, a Fars editor said on Friday.
Fars is not the first to mistake The Onion for a legitimate news source. Mashable reported that ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith fell for an article published earlier this month about him and fiction son. Smith went on a Twitter tirade before realizing his own mistake. He tweeted, "Haaaaa. The got me. I didn't know it was on Satire! Got it. Peeps got jokes. It's cool!"
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