Complete and Utter Zebu

A TV show in Australia called Hungry Beast decided to see just how assiduously their nation’s press checked the gibberish, spin and self-promotion that comprises most press releases before reporting them. They invented a body called The Levitt Institute to make “nation wide studies of the Australian sociological character”

The Levitt Institute’s first report was, rather fittingly, about gullibility. It claimed to have studied various cities and found that Sydney was the most gullible in Australia. They issued the report through a news service and it should have got no further. After all, the only reference online to The Levitt Institute was the website they had only just set up, the Levitt Institute’s address was a derelict building and within the report was the sentence:

“These results were completely made up to be fictitious material through a process of modified truth and credibility nodes.”

It didn’t matter a spit. The nation’s press lapped it up like a cat attacking spilt cream. Eventually, one journalist smelt something fishy and did a bit of digging. It took them just 10 minutes to work out what was going on.

Here’s the video explaining it all. The question is, would news organisations in America or Europe be any more diligent in checking something out before parrotting press release guff? As the guys on Hungry Beast point out, if they found it so easy to con the press with their slender resources, how much easier is it for well-funded special-interest groups to get their message across?

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