Oh, April Fool's Day. The perfect day for regular people to turn into mischievous pranksters and for respectable news sources to make up some gripping stories.
A CNN story credited the tradition of news outlets creating outrageous stories to the infamous '50s BBC report, which claimed that Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop that year. Several people fell for the crazy report, which also featured pictures of farmers harvesting spaghetti from their trees, and called in asking how they could get their own spaghetti trees.
The April Fool's fake news tradition has stuck. The Collegian made an attempt at a humorous April Fool's Edition, and a couple years ago, the Argus Leader had a fake sports story. The Argus piece said that an eighth grader was going to be the next big thing in basketball. I believe he was said to be freakishly tall and an amazing shot, and NBA scouts were already recruiting him. The final paragraph of the story exposed the hoax. It told readers to look at the first letter of every paragraph; the letters spelled HAPPY APRIL FOOL'S DAY.
According to CNN, one of this year's pranks involved the popular site Twitter. A paper in London claimed it would be the first newspaper to deliver its news exclusively through Twitter. I think the paper should have included a link in the paper to a fake Twitter account that just said:
OMG, U just got pranked by a "dead" medium. LOL!
ROTFL, G2G.
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