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August 26, 2005
Heartbreaking Letters By Little Girl To Iraq-Casualty Father-- A Hoax
And a college newspaper has been publishing these phoney tearjerkers for two years.
Without actually verifying these letters were legit, or that the little girl actually existed. A woman posing as the "girl's" "aunt" delivered the letters to the paper... but no one asked to see the girl.
They were also pondering how it was that the girl and the woman [posing as the "girl's" aunt] became so close to newspaper staff members that no one thought to check out their story - even after the woman once showed up in the newsroom claiming to be not herself, but a twin sister.
"Looking back on it now, it makes so much sense. I don't know how I could have been such an idiot," said Michael Brenner, the former Daily Egyptian reporter who first wrote about Kodee, and then spent two years staying in contact as a close friend of her and her purported aunt and guardian, who said her name was Colleen Hastings.
I know how it happened. As usual, it was a story you wanted to believe.
Sign them up for the MSM, post-haste. They've got the chops. Run with an emotional anti-Republican, anti-war story without checking facts -- even when the woman posing as the "aunt" shows up pretending to be a "twin sister" -- and then just confess to a vague breakdown in the process of multiple layers of painstaking editorial fact-checking.
And then make sure you say, "Well, we get 90% of these right."
Via Tim Blair.
Thanks to Matt.