Uncle Barky trapped in refrigerator -- eats own foot
04/01/08 05:41 PM
By ED BARK
Fox4 fell hard Tuesday for an April Fool's joke about a $900 million retractable roof to be built over the Texas Motor Speedway.
Anchor Dan Godwin put the "story" out on the station's noon newscast before retracting it on the air later.
The fake news came in a press release and Web site posting from paddocktalk.com. But a subhead should have been enough to warn most people off. "Alluring Project Requires Incredible Logistics For Oval Of Landmark Significance," it read. Spell out the first letters of those words and it reads "April Fools."
Another tipoff was the phony name of the "project manager," Sidd Finch. That's the made-up moniker of a pitching phenom in a famous April Fool's hoax article written in 1985 for Sports Illustrated by George Plimpton. The phony New York Mets prospect supposedly could throw a 168 mph fastball.
Also, TMS president Eddie Gossage was referenced only as "Gossage" in the press release. In his closing "quote," he said, "It's only appropriate that we announced such an outlandish project like this on the first day of April. We'd be foolish to think it would be possible."
Fox4 bit anyway. It's not immediately known if anyone else did.
Fox4 fell hard Tuesday for an April Fool's joke about a $900 million retractable roof to be built over the Texas Motor Speedway.
Anchor Dan Godwin put the "story" out on the station's noon newscast before retracting it on the air later.
The fake news came in a press release and Web site posting from paddocktalk.com. But a subhead should have been enough to warn most people off. "Alluring Project Requires Incredible Logistics For Oval Of Landmark Significance," it read. Spell out the first letters of those words and it reads "April Fools."
Another tipoff was the phony name of the "project manager," Sidd Finch. That's the made-up moniker of a pitching phenom in a famous April Fool's hoax article written in 1985 for Sports Illustrated by George Plimpton. The phony New York Mets prospect supposedly could throw a 168 mph fastball.
Also, TMS president Eddie Gossage was referenced only as "Gossage" in the press release. In his closing "quote," he said, "It's only appropriate that we announced such an outlandish project like this on the first day of April. We'd be foolish to think it would be possible."
Fox4 bit anyway. It's not immediately known if anyone else did.