Public Service Announcement Re: Eugenics for Fat People

If you see, or have seen, this alarming Pacific Northwest Medical Journal article about state-sponsored "gene-line cleansing" for the obese, rest assured that it is a media-baiting hoax. The perpetrators, incidentally, are mad as hell and genetically unlikely to take it anymore:

Once again, we've proved that so-called "journalists" at so-called "reputable news agencies" are so-called "Fucking lazy". It's not like we didn't drop about two billion clues that this particular article might not be full to the brim with medical fact, you know. In fact, we set up a voicemail system to log calls to the Pacific Northwest Medical Association specifically to track just how many reference and source checks were made by you, the mass media. The integrity part of Journalistic Integrity has been left completely by the wayside, and reporters / writers / disc jockeys / what-have-you are simply scraping sites like Fark.com and BoingBoing.net without so much as a verification call.

And we, two members of an extremely annoyed American public, are now formally asking that you guys knock it off.

And yes, I was a keystroke or two away from being rooked myself. Thanks, Technorati!

Comments

[Tim Cavanaugh]

Jesus, when you hoax people and they take the bait, you're supposed to wink and grin and let the marks stew in their own foolishness, not launch into a vein-popping tantrum of cussing and name-calling. These guys ruined their own joke.

[David]

If there one thing I do enjoy, it's a good eugenics paper ploy!

The original article is pretty convincingly written for the most part. I tip my cap to Joe and Bill

[Lee]

No I think it works best with their tirade on the journalists. Matter of fact if more people starting blasting journalists for being lazy pieces of shit, maybe they would start doing their jobs.

[Ironchef]

Bloggers undoubtedly would have also fallen for the hoax. They also undoubtedly would have corrected themselves far faster than any MSM outlet.

[Gary Gunnels]

I think the tirade was perfectly apropos. 🙂

[Mass Media Apologist]

Technorati just lists blogs that fell for it. Who are the "mass media" and "reputable news agencies" that fell for this? Couldn't a so-called journalist have checked this out by, say, calling someone at the city of San Francisco rather than log a call at the PNMJ? Or maybe they are lazy because they didn't even report the story?

[Matt Welch]

*Some* of the Technorati citings figured it out. Or at least one did....

[Rimfax]

As an MSM critic, I drank deep from the cup of schadenfreude, but have found absolutely zero references to the article. In fact, Google doesn't even find the article page itself.

Anybody else have any luck?

[Warren]

Effin Eh Right! I only wish more people were devoted to making the gullibility of the media explicit.

[Brian]

I didn't see where it made much of an impact. I only found a few blogs that had linked to it. And bloggers aren't really journalists. Right? Right?

[Mass Media Apologist again]

OK, I found one!

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=obese+vasectomy

Oh, wait, the Lone Star Times is just a blog, too!
So what is it that we have proved again?

[Oh..never mind...]

First they came for the fatties...but I was not fat...

[Oh..never mind...]

First they came for the fatties...but I was not fat...

[Czar]

That's nothing compared to the Something Awful poster who started the whole "The average person swallows x number of spiders in his/her sleep every year" crap just to see how many gullible people would swallow a crap statistic and spread it around.

[The Lonewacko Blog]

Bloggers undoubtedly would have also fallen for the hoax. They also undoubtedly would have corrected themselves far faster than any MSM outlet.

I wouldn't have fallen for this. I'd probably have done what I just did: search google for the articles on their front page, two of which are just copies of real articles published in apparently real journals. Even their text for submitters was copied from an apparently real medical journal.

Since they didn't have to write much of anything themselves, this appears to have been a fairly low cost hoax.

[Mark]

You'd think they would notice that all the numbered "References" at the bottom are obviously irrelevant. Endometrial ablation? Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis? WTF do those have to do with the article? (And most of them are never referred to in the paper.) Do MSM reporters really make it through college without ever having to look at a journal article?

[johnL]

Since it appears only bloggers, not MSM fell for the original hoax, maybe the tirade against MSM is an additional hoax against bloggers that's caught even the sharp minds at Reason.

[zeroentitlement]

I noted that most of the bogus references at the bottom were for articles emphasizing the role of patients' declared feelings/quality of life, as opposed to merely their test results and physician biases, in making decisions about their healthcare. Well done; five snaps.

[speedzter]

Have a look at this collection of funny Fat People Pictures.