American broadcast journalism hit another low this week after highly publicizing a YouTube video without checking its authenticity, and now its creator admitted the ridiculous video was staged.
Nathan Fielder told The New York Times that the 30-second video titled "Pig rescues baby goat" was a fake produced by a crew of animal experts, trainers, and humane officers to promote the new Comedy Central show "Nathan for You' which is premiering on Thursday.
The video was posted on YouTube in mid September and so far has been viewed over 7 million times. In the video, a pig swims out to rescue a baby goat that is calling for help as it's stranded in the middle of a pond.
The video raises a slew of questions, questions that veteran reporters from popular news shows strangely didn't bother to ask.
The "Today" show, "Nightly News", "Good Morning America", and "Fox & Friends" all played the video and not one wondered how the whole scene unfolded. In fact, according to The New York Times report, when Elizabeth Vargas of "Good Morning America" began to wonder how the pig managed to free the trapped goat she was flooded with laughter, the shows weather anchor Sam Champion said to her "Every day with Elizabeth, it's like, 'How did this happen?"
Experienced reporters are not so naive. It's obvious now that the video and the media buzz that followed was nothing more than a well organized promotional stunt forced onto the television gazing public. Even the New York Times story that exposed the video as a fake was in on it. Why would the story break only two days before the premiere of the show that was the impetus for the whole thing?
"It really is embarrassing for the journalists who stumbled upon this and decided to promote it or share it with their audience," Kelly McBride, the senior faculty for ethics, reporting and writing at the Poynter Institute, told the New York Times. "It's almost a form of malpractice."
Thankfully, it's only a silly video of a cute pig and a baby goat. It's not like they were trying to sell a war, again.
- Contribute to this Story:
- Send us a tip
- Send us a photo or video
- Suggest a correction
