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Twitter is all so very amusing, but it is not the place that network news can rely for source material. Not without double checking. Every. Single. Word.
DPRK News Service is a parody account. The parody account is run by Popehat, another twitter account, also a website. Popehat is run by a group of people, originally gamers. Several of them are attorneys or work in related fields. They are interested in legal matters, geek culture, popular culture, products, films, music, books, food, and general Tom foolery.
Their DPRK parody account is obvious if you care to scroll down and take in the entries it becomes clear. But fail to do that and you risk being taken in. When news services rely on Twitter, their first mistake, then use a parody account for their information, second mistake, and fail to double check, third mistake, then misinformation spreads like wildfire.
Recently Greta Van Susteren of Fox News was taken in. She claims that her three visits to North Korea (and so her reading a lot of history on North Korea!) make her someone with unique insight. She believes North Korea's hack against Sony is actually directed at Japan. She provides historical reasoning. She uses DPRK News Service as her source of information without double checking. She publishes all this. It goes all too far. Finally Patrick Non-White of Popehat can take no more of it and reveals to Greta Van Susteren that NPRK News Service is a parody account, but she fails to take heed and persists with her insistence on her angle about North Korea's real aim being Japan, not the United States. This time.
Perhaps her mail is too full. Perhaps she gets a lot of advice from crackpots.
At length, Patrick Non-White tells Greta Van Susteren that he can predict with 100% accuracy the next thing that will appear on the DPRK News Service within the next 10 minutes. Something ridiculous.
At last it sinks in and Greta Van Susteren makes a minor adjustment to her page, "some say it's a hoax." Finally taking down the whole page as the hoax is fully exposed. No doubt embarrassing to her self-regarding expertise on North Korea derived from her three visits and her historical reading.
Proving once again Americans as a general rule just flat do not get parody.
But, but, but, it has a North Korean flag!
How is America to possibly get parody when the whole nation, the whole world in fact, continually out-parodies parody itself? It gets down to double checking. It gets down to never trusting Twitter for anything at all. Except entertainment and even that is questionable. That's it. Occasionally genuine information peeps through. But not reliably so.
The story is mostly about Greta Van Susteren because she is the person Patrick Non-White writing for Popehat revealed himself. What a bummer to have to explain that your site is parody. She has the widest audience apparently, so does the greatest damage. But DPRK News Service site also took in Slate. To its credit Slate left up their page with a correction. The author claims it was a "misstatement" Patrick Non-White insists, no, it was a failure to read (through the rest of DPRK News Service to see and to process it is a parody site, meant to be amusing not meant to be believed.)
I would prefer he not reveal himself as parody and let the thing run. Allow news providers to further damage themselves.
The Washington Post is also taken in by DPRK News Service parody site.
Newsweek is also taken in by the parody site.
Reuters also falls for the joke.
CNN also stumbles over DPRK News Service parody site.
Of them all, Newsweek can take a good joke. They invited Patrick Non-White for an interview.
If you choose to read through the 81 comments you see several instances of the terrible tormenting ass-bug that singles out FOX News as singularly bogus unreliable Network.
