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  • 2013-02-05 (xsd:date)
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  • House Republicans Schedule Obama Impeachment Hearings (en)
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  • On 14 October 2013, the Daily Currant published an article positing that House Republicans had introduced a resolution to impeach President Obama due to his inability to halt the federal government shutdown: By the end of the day links and excerpts referencing this article were being circulated via social media, with many of those who encountered it mistaking it for a genuine news item. However, the article was just a political spoof from the Daily Currant, whose About page notes that web site deals strictly in satire: A similar pseudo-report that Congress was scheduled to begin impeachment hearings against Barack Obama on 11 July 2013 over his use of U.S. military forces in Libya and Syria and his involvement in the Fast and Furious scandal stemmed from an article entitled Obama Impeachment Hearings Begin which was published by the Weekly World News on 5 February 2013 and began as follows: However, nothing published by the Weekly World News should be confused with reality either, as that web site is the online successor to the popular entertainment tabloid whose stock in trade was (and remains) fantastically fictional stories, such as Alien Spaceships to Attack Earth in March 2013, Lindsay Lohan to Give Birth to Neanderthal, and How to Sell Your Soul to the Devil! Occasionally, as in this case, Weekly World News spoofs escape into the wilds of the Internet, and those who encounter them online in unattributed form (or who are unfamiliar with the nature of the Weekly World News) mistake them for real news stories. As the Weekly World News frequently does, once the date specified in its original article came and passed without the occurrence of the predicted event (i.e., no impeachment proceedings began on 11 March 2013), it simply substituted a new date (11 July 2013) for the original one and republished the article. In this case, an obvious giveaway to the Weekly World News' reuse of older material is that the updated version of the impeachment article still referred to proceedings beginning on a Monday, but the revised date listed for that event (11 July) actually fell on a Thursday. (en)
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