The news agency, which is believed sponsored by the Pasdaran, carried a news report saying that a Gallup Poll revealed that rural white Americans would rather have Mahmud Ahmadi-nejad as their president than Barack Obama.
This startling revelation, however, did not come from Gallup, but rather from The Onion, a weekly tabloid of news satire in which not a shred of truth is ever to be found.
The blunder underscored the unreal world occupied by the establishment of the Islamic Republic, a world in which facts and logic are often turned upside down, as last month when Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi said America forbids the publication of anything critical of homsexuality and Presiduent Ahmad-nejad insisted that Europe is squeezing the water out of clouds before they reach Iran so as to cause a drought in Iran.
Last week, someone at Fars was apparently trolling the web looking for stories. He lifted the story from The Onion in toto. Since he did not credit the story to The Onion but to Gallup, senior editors were not alerted. Nonetheless, good sense should have sparked editorial suspicion.
The story said that 77 percent of rural white Americans “would rather vote for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than US President Barack Obama.”
Fars made just two edits to the story as run by The Onion. The original story quoted a mythical voter as saying he would rather “have a beer with Ahmadi-nejad than spend time with Obama,” a common American way of expressing the likeability of a public figure. Fars changed “beer” to “drink.”
In the other change, Fars deleted a phrase describing Ahmadi-nejad as “a man who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and has had numerous political prisoners executed.”
Within hours of the story being posted on the Fars English website, foreign agencies had seen it and were guffawing at the expense of Fars, pronounced farce, which some commentators said was proven to be an accurate name by its treatment of The Onion story.
Fars quickly removed the story from its website. Two days later, as foreign publications continued to ridicule Fars, the news agency posted an apology—albeit a rather odd apology that said a real public opinion poll of Americans would probably show results like The Onion reported.
“Unfortunately, an incorrect item was released on our website on Friday,” Fars said. “We offer our formal apologies for that mistake…. We do believe that if a free opinion poll is conducted in the US, a majority of Americans would prefer anyone outside the US political system to President Obama and American statesmen.”
The Onion, which uses the slogan, “America’s Finest News Source,” did not complain about the theft of its story without attribution. Instead, it laughed heartily. Editor Will Tracy said, “The Onion shares content with Fars and commends the journalists at Iran’s Finest News Source on their superb reportage.”
On its website, The Onion added a footnote to its story on the phony Gallup Poll that said, “For more on this story, please visit our Iranian subsidiary organization, Fars.” It then provided a link to a copy of the Fars story that remains long after Fars had killed the original.
In defense of the Fars staff, it should be noted that this is by no means the first (or last) time that some publication has lifted a story from The Onion believing The Onion (despite its name) to be an honest-to-goodness newspaper. For example, eight years ago the Beijing Evening News used a report from The Onion asserting that the US Congress was threatening to leave Washington unless the Capitol building was renovated to add more bathrooms as well as a retractable dome such as many sports stadiums now have.