Trust but verify

I haven’t been this stunned since I learned the truth about the Easter Bunny. Brace yourselves:

Tabloid newspapers print all kinds of crap that isn’t true.

You read that right. A British filmmaker has admitted duping tabloids by planting all kinds of fake stories.

He and his cohorts would phone in some nonsense — like Amy Winehouse’s beehive hairdo catching fire — and it would be in print the next morning.

Again and again they lobbed false information like grenades of deception over the walls of truth. Again and again it was printed and taken as gospel by the people who buy tabloids at checkout stands.

I feel violated. I’ve gone my whole life believing that Elvis appears now and then, that aliens abduct night fishermen, that secret machines are still being discovered in the pyramids and that Marilyn Monroe was killed by the CIA because she was in on a plot to kill JFK.

Now, apparently none of that is true. … Maybe the part about Marilyn Monroe, but not the rest.

What a sad day. Next you’ll be telling me that half the crap on the Internet is bogus too.