Fake news site Haaretz decided to run an article featuring material from fake news site The New Yorker. As documented by Elder of Ziyon, Haaretz's Amir Oren has an odd idea of news sources.
Amir Oren is a senior correspondent and columnist for Haaretz and a member of the newspaper's editorial board.
He writes in Haaretz:"Foreign visitors stream to the White House, but there is an embarrassing emptiness there behind the power of Trump’s son-in-law-adviser, Jared Kushner, who boasted that, while waiting to board ski lifts on vacation, he read up on the Middle East on his smartphone."
The source for this story? A joke column written in The New Yorker by Andy Borowitz:
"BAGHDAD (The Borowitz Report)—Jared Kushner said on Tuesday that he became “incredibly well-informed” on the Middle East by reading up on the region while waiting for the ski lift on a recent trip to Aspen.
“There would be times when you’d have to wait five or even ten minutes for the ski lift, and that’s when I’d take out my phone and read up on the Middle East,” he said. “I really got into it.”
Now on some level you could sympathize with Oren. The New Yorker is supposed to be a legitimate news site. It's not the Daily Currant. But Borowitz is the biggest draw on the site. Not because he's funny but because the New Yorker is utterly terrible. But the tone makes it really obvious that this isn't real. Even though Borowitz's idea of satire is pandering to lefties without bothering to really write the jokes in.
If Oren had read more than one paragraph, it would have been obvious that it was satire. Worse still, Haaretz is still refusing to correct the article. And any American leftie would tell them that the Borowitz Report is a gag column. Still this is an interesting case of two left-wing media outlets infecting each other with fake news. The New Yorker has cited Haaretz before. And now Haaretz cites the New Yorker.
Of course Andy Borowitz isn't the New Yorker's most prominent source of fake news. That would be Seymour Hersh.