PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2017-04-15 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Did a Couple Find Out They Were Biological Twins During IVF Treatment? (en)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • In mid-April 2017, a number of online publications in the U.S. and UK (including the Daily Mail, Fox News, the Inquisitr, Metro, the Mirror, and the Evening Standard) published accounts of a couple who supposedly sought treatment to conceive via IVF, only to discover to their shock that they were biological twins: All of these reports were based on a single source, an article published on 13 April 2017 on the Mississippi Herald web site: None of the outlets that republished this story seemed fazed by the fact that the Mississippi Herald report included no verifiable details (such as the byline of the reporter who wrote it, the name of the clinic, the identity of any medical specialist there, or the name of the patients involved). Or that the same site ran a similarly outrageous and non-detailed article about a man who claimed he was sexually seduced by a horse. Or that the Mississippi Herald's web site includes no contact information — no physical address, phone number, or e-mail address — for its office or any of its personnel. Or that there is no such newspaper as the Mississippi Herald (the closest matches are a Biloxi publication called the Mississippi Sun-Herald and Water Valley's small North Mississippi Herald), and the web site purporting to be such only sprang up online a few days before publishing the story referenced above. Or that the story was virtually identical word-for-word (save for the change in locale) to one published by the web site of another non-existent newspaper, the Denver Inquirer, back in December 2016 (also just after that site's establishment): In short, both the Mississippi Herald and the Denver Inquirer are fake newspaper sites set up for no other ostensible purpose than to spread fictitious stories. And a number of online news publications ran with one of their fictitious stories without having made the slightest attempt to verify it, based on nothing more than one dubious source that should have raised a plethora of red flags in a real newsroom. (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url