A British filmmaker duped some of the country’s top tabloid newspapers into printing fake stories about celebrities, including one about Amy Winehouse’s beehive catching fire, he said in an interview with the Guardian last week.
Chris Atkins and his team put in hoax calls to some of Britain’s best-known newsrooms, including that one girl band singer was a physics wizard, only to see the details printed — unchecked — in the press the next day.
Among the celebrity “sightings” they invented was a tale about how troubled British singer Winehouse had been playing music with friends when the fuse blew and set fire to her hair in its trademark beehive style.
The story appeared in two major tabloid papers, before being splashed across the Internet.
“We wanted to test how much truth there is in much of the celebrity stories that now completely dominate all areas of our news media,” said the director, who details the team’s two-year investigations in a new movie, Starsuckers.
“And we specifically wanted to see how much journalists fact-checked their stories. So in order to do this, we made some stories up.
“We made up a whole range of crazy tales of celebrity misshap and tried to see how easy it would be to get these into the tabloid press.
“On no account were any of the stories we sold and were printed fact-checked in any way. They could’ve been fact-checked and they would have shown to be the nonsense they were within minutes.”
In another incident, one of Atkins’ colleagues called a best-selling newspaper pretending to be the wife of a furniture removal man who said he had helped Sarah Harding of British girl band Girls Aloud to move house.
She detailed how the blonde singer had lots of books on quantum physics and a telescope at home, sparking headlines that “Sarah’s a boffin” and prompting a flurry of stories across the world.
Atkins insisted that despite being offered money for the stories, his team was never paid for their work — although he recommended selling fake stories to the tabloids as an easy way to make a quick buck during the recession.
None of this seemed surprising to George Clooney — the son of a journalist and a man who has had many column inches devoted to his life — when he was asked his opinion on the media’s obsession with celebrity at the London film festival ahead of the UK premiere of his film The Men Who Stare at Goats.
Clooney said he was sympathetic to journalists. “I’m the son of a newsman, I grew up around news,” he said. “It’s a tricky thing, you have to sell papers, I get it.
“The problem is that there is so little reporting any more, somebody will write a story and it will be in 1,800 different outlets and you have no recourse. It will be false and you’ll go ‘it’s not true’ and they’ll go ‘we’re not saying that, we’re saying a London tabloid has said it.’”
Clooney’s co-star, Kevin Spacey, said: “I don’t understand why that’s of interest, to write something false. If you even bother to say ‘that story has no wit of truth to it’ they write that you denied that story is true, which is not the same thing as saying what we wrote was absolutely wrong.”
Clooney and Spacey spoke after the Guardian reported on Starsuckers.
In other news, it was a tough week for reality star Jon Gosselin.
A lawyer for his wife Kate says her estranged husband has been ordered to return US$180,000 in marital funds.
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