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Reporter Who Faked News Kills Himself

M

Mighty_Emperor

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
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Aug 18, 2002
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He had a long and distinguished career in the news and no one really gets to the bottom of why he did it. Its a long report but the important bits are:

A Sky News correspondent who lost his job after faking a report during the war in Iraq has been found hanged, it emerged yesterday.

James Forlong, an award-winning reporter who covered many of the world's troublespots for the channel, was devastated at being exposed in a television documentary on a rival channel three months ago.

........

Forlong's report purported to show a missile being fired by a Royal Navy submarine at sea during the Iraq war. The pooled report was shown on ITV and channels around the world as well as Sky before a BBC documentary team revealed that Forlong had been filing from a vessel in dock which had not fired a missile while he was on board. Images of the missile flying through the air were taken from archive footage. The BBC story was publicised in the Guardian.

...........

Forlong's career began on local newspapers in Sussex. He worked as a BBC radio reporter before moving into television in 1988 at ITN. He joined Sky in 1993 as senior foreign correspondent.
Click to expand...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1057514,00.html

See also:

http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,7493,1057203,00.html

other links on this going back to when the story broke in July are at the bottom of the second link.

Emps
 
Anyone who'd go to such lengths to put a story out that they broadcast a pack of lies must have beena bit mentally unstable to begin with.

I'm not being flippant here, but- does anyone remember 'Drop The Dead Donkey' which featured a war reporter who carried various child-related paraphernalia - teddy, little shoe etc- to chuck into camera shot to make his reports more shocking?

Reminds me of him a bit- bending the truth so far that it becomes a lie.:(
 
escargot:

I'm not being flippant here, but- does anyone remember 'Drop The Dead Donkey' which featured a war reporter who carried various child-related paraphernalia - teddy, little shoe etc- to chuck into camera shot to make his reports more shocking?
Click to expand...

Yes (the confronted the reporter with his reports from a plane crash, war zone, etc. and the same teddy bear was always visible in the shot) and I think that was mentioned in one of the reports I read - I suspect this might happen more often than we think :(

Lets be honest DtDD wouldn't have had it in as a plotline if it wasn't 'understood' to have happened.

Emps
 
I loved DtDD and Emperor's right that these things go on.

I particularly enjoyed the scene where a film clip is shown of an eastern European man wailing in his own language, subtitled 'My sister was raped, my brother was killed, I do not know what happened to my poor mother.....'

The office cleaner happens to be from the same country and gives the correct translation- 'The day Elvis died we were so shocked. My brother had all his records and played them non-stop for a week!' and so on.

Anyone care to bet that Forlong would have laughed long and hard at that one too?

Someone I know has relatives in Belfast who tells stories of journos offering kids cash to be photographed throwing stones as if they're rioting. :rolleyes:
 
If he was inside the sub...how could they film the missile being launched? Was his cameraman out for a swim at the time? Those things can be -and usually are- launched while submerged.
 
We have one (or two, or three...) of those too.

There is one journalist who has been caught:
  • Pretending to be hounded by Majorcan police (on behalf of Christopher Skase) while in Barcelona filming the traffic police rearranging the traffic flow for peak hour.
  • Claiming to be driving either in or out of Iraq during the war, showing tanks going the other way, and not being challenged, when he was actually in Kuwait or somewhere like that, and nowhere near the conflict.
  • Reusing footage, and a complete interview (the names being changed) from a story on gambling addiction for a story on unruly tenants (or something like that).
And yet he continues to work.

Then there was the woman who illustrated a story on a UNICEF report about the dangers of unused and/or unexploded ordinance in Iraq by getting children to play on an abandoned missile. It gets better. Her husband works for UNICEF.
 
whatever happened to that German chap (was it Dorn?) who filmed..KuKluxKlan, Basque speratist, Neo Nazies etc all of which he got awards for and all of whom were his mates mucking about in the hills!
 
Damien Day was my favourite character in DtDD.

There's a cracking bit where he's filming from a 'war torn' village that looks just a bit too pedestrian, so to spice things up he throws a firecracker over a wall, cue explosion, smoke, people running and screaming...
 
There was also the Nigerian (?) journalist who posted reports from the war but was found later hiding in a cupbaord (or something).

Can't find any sources for this (or the German documentary maker) but I'm sure they'll float to the surface at some point.

Emps
 
Emperor said:
There was also the Nigerian (?) journalist who posted reports from the war but was found later hiding in a cupbaord (or something).
Click to expand...

sensible chap
 
Emperor said:
There was also the Nigerian (?) journalist who posted reports from the war but was found later hiding in a cupbaord (or something).
Click to expand...
The guy you're after is a journalist from Swaziland...

Swaziland's war reporter exposed

A senior radio reporter in Swaziland who has been pretending to be reporting live from the war front in Iraq has been exposed as a fraud.
Phesheya Dube who works for the state broadcaster, Radio Swaziland, was spotted in parliament by eagled-eyed MPs, Reuters news agency reported.


No Swazi Radio microphone visible

Since the start of the war on Iraq, Mr Dube had been reporting on the English language "The Morning Show".

The programme's presenter helped in the charade, by wishing Mr Dube well and telling him to "find a cave somewhere to be safe from the missiles" after he filed his pieces.

But it appears he had just followed reports on the war from international radio and television networks, and then re-written them as his own eyewitness material.

In parliament, MP Jojo Dlamini asked information minister: "Why are they lying to the nation that the man is in Iraq when he is here in Swaziland, broadcasting from a broom cupboard?"

Public not bothered

Swazi journalist Thulane Mthethwa in Mbabane told BBC News Online that the deception had now stopped, although the reporter could still be heard on air reporting other news.

He said that surprisingly there has been no reaction from the public to the radio station's underhand practice.

Ususally letters would be expected to the editor of the Times Of Swaziland newspaper, in which the story appeared last week, or outrage would be expected on the station's own phone-in programmes.

"The only thing about the war that the ordinary people are concerned about is its effect on the price of fuel which might lead to an increase in prices of goods," our correspondent said.
Click to expand...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/2904065.stm
 
Emperor said:
There was also the Nigerian (?) journalist who posted reports from the war but was found later hiding in a cupbaord (or something).

Can't find any sources for this (or the German documentary maker) but I'm sure they'll float to the surface at some point.

Emps
Click to expand...

just spent half an hour surfing and googleing..to no avail.
 
Fortis: Well found - thats the one I was thinking of :)

sidecar_jon: Sorry I led us both astray there with the Nigerian bit :(

You are right - if I got told to go and report in Iraq I think you'd be able to find me in a cupboard or somewhere under the stairs.

Emps
 
Michael Born a freelance documentary producer in Germany, made up the news as he went along, creating German KKK rallies, interviewing Albanian ``Kurds'' and German ``Austrian terrorists,'' and following a domestic cat hunter he hired to stalk some cute fluffy thing with a rifle to report on this alarming trend.
http://www.sniggle.net/news.php

im on his trail...
 
German police, charged with enforcing laws against forbidden opinions and points of view, are sometimes taken in by hoaxers, as when recently they began an investigation to discover a German organization of "racists" using the robes and imagery of the American Ku Klux Klan.

They were clued into this group by a television documentary showing alleged hidden camera footage of the group, wearing robes and burning a cross. The program was produced by well-known filmmaker Michael Born, who, the investigation eventually revealed, had paid some of his friends to dress up in Klan robes and stage a cross-burning. The investigators say Born did this because he knew that broadcast executives were eager to denounce racism, and he gladly made phony news films to satisfy their demand.

According to prosecutors, Born has made at least 22 supposed documentaries and sold them to German television in the last five years. Born did not deny that he had fictionalized, faked, and baldly lied in his "documentaries," but excused himself with the claim that "Many others do it, too," and that the network bosses encouraged him to do so
http://www.natvan.com/free-speech/fs967f.html

more here
http://www.codoh.com/newrevoices/nros/nroslitfig.html


gawd that took some chasing! perhapse they are embaresed!
 
Then there was The Independant's frontpage story from a year or two back on the rail strike that was disrupting rail travel in the south.

They had a large photo of the departures and arrivals boards at Waterloo station that were totally blank. Sadly those boards had been out of use for some time (they had moved over to dinky little plasma screens) and hence it was a gratuitous bit of spin, and mis-representation.
 
sidecar_jon: Good find it is tricky to find stuff on this (I'm sure I read something on this somewhere pos. in the Guardian before it mde itself available online).

Victoria Mapplebeck produced a documentary on Michael Born called 'Hoax' in a Channel 4 co-production so I might also have seen this at some point.

http://www.the-loop.com/smarthearts/html/background/247bios.html

http://www.yle.fi/d-projekti/arkisto/paasarja/99huijaus.html#hoax

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/fipa/prog/2000/rep_00925.htm

---------
I think the sad thing is that this has played into the hands of the far right and holocaust revisionists (as in both those links in sidecar_jon's post and in other links I came across). I'm sure he thought he was doing no harm but........

Emps
 
Hopefully, our Jayson Blair will follow suit. But, no such luck, as he has signed a lucractive book deal.

http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local...4359997.story?coll=nyc-manheadlines-manhattan

September 10, 2003, 3:35 PM EDT

Jayson Blair, the former New York Times reporter who resigned amid accusations of fraud and plagiarism, has a book deal with New Millennium Press, a Los Angeles-based publisher with its own controversial past.

The book, "Burning Down My Master's House," is scheduled to come out in March 2004, with a first printing of more than 200,000, New Millennium co-president Michael Viner said Wednesday.

Blair resigned from the paper on May 1 after filing some three dozen phony or plagiarized stories from October 2002 to April 2003.

The scandal surrounding the 27-year-old former national correspondent led to the resignations of Times executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd.

Blair soon announced he was seeking a book deal, but several New York publishers said they were not interested. Viner said Wednesday he was not concerned about the reliability of Blair's memoir.

"He is very anxious that the book be well vetted, as are we," Viner said.

New Millennium was involved in disputes in 2002 with physicist Stephen Hawking and novelist David Baldacci. Hawking asked the Federal Trade Commission to stop New Millennium's publication of "The Theory of Everything," which the physicist said would "constitute a fraud on the public" because it simply repackages old material. The book was published, and a paperback edition released in June, although Hawking's Web site urges readers "not to purchase this book in the belief that Professor Hawking was involved in its creation."

Baldacci, author of such best sellers as "Absolute Power" and "Last Man Standing," complained that his name was featured too prominently on the cover of a New Millennium anthology of mystery stories. Baldacci's name appeared in large foil letters above the title of the book, the same title as a novella contributed by Baldacci.

Granting a rare preliminary injunction, a federal judge in New York ruled that consumers could mistake the anthology for Baldacci's novel, and wrote that New Millennium "was attempting to deceive the public into buying a misrepresented book." New Millennium and Baldacci later agreed that the cover would be altered and the book released. Baldacci's name appeared below the title, in smaller letters.
 
DtDD,-my favorite bit, a reporter want to film some distressed African children but they are too happy, skipping about playing etc, the camera moves away, there are some thumping noises and, hey presto, crying children!

I hate journalists, my own dealing with then have been on a very small scale but I think it proves that they will say anything, on any level to get a "good" story, regardless of whether that story is true.

One small scale incident was 10 years or so ago in Glasgow when the Whaling commision met to decide whether some countries should be allowed to resume whaling. I went along to protest. On the first couple of days we were at the front of Central station, then when the conference started properly, the protest moved round to where the meeting was actually happening to cause a bit of disruption, apart from a few of us who stayed at the front so people knew we were still there. A camera crew turned up and the reporter proceeded to get his microphone out and give a report detailing how everyone had given up the protest and couldn't be bothered any more. We told him the protest had moved but no, that was not the story he wanted. You could even hear all the noise from the large protest round the corner. I daresay they managed to edit that out somehow.

Every other time I have had anything to do with journalists it has been the same. We have to rely on them to give us the news but I always take everything they say with a large pinch of salt because I know it is probably not true. It is disgusting that they get paid to make up fiction and present it as fact.:furious:
 
Yup, journos are shite. I was looking through some old news clippings recently and found a photo of one of my sons at playgroup, with the caption 'glad to be taken off Mum's hands for a morning!' Didn't the idiot who wrote that have any idea of how insulting it was?

How about this attention grabbing first line- 'a local cancer charity has received a cheque for £250 from a 60 year-old woman.'
:rolleyes:

My dog could do better than that.
 
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