Hoaxing the Internet

Dave Weigel explains the latest twist in the sad saga of infotainment:

Elan Gale, a producer for The Bachelor and thereby one of the worst people on the planet, spent part of Thanksgiving live-tweeting what he said was a feud with an irritating woman “in mom jeans” who complained too loudly about her flight delay. Gale sent her drinks and notes telling her to shut her mouth and "eat a dick." The Internet loved it, especially BuzzFeed, whose Rachel Zarrell aggregated Gale’s tweets and photos. Her post, on one of the year’s slowest news cycles, got nearly 1.4 million reads.

One problem: Gale’s story was B.S. Maybe people should have sussed that out, as he took many photos but none of his "target." But they didn’t. Zarrell got to write a follow-up aggregating more Gale tweets about how he punked everyone. I got irritated, not really at BuzzFeed but at Gale—again, Bachelor producer. This guy, for a living, comes up with ideas that stimulate the pleasure or anger centers of the lumpen proletariat’s brains. He did it on Twitter and captivated the Internet with a complete farce. I ribbed BuzzFeed about this (after all, the phony story was worth 1 percent of their record November traffic) and, after a friendly back-and-forth, politics editor McKay Coppins snarked me off. . . .

This is fairly messed up. Yes, people on the Internet want to believe salacious stories. Reporters want to publish stories that people read. If there’s a great reward, and little downside, to be had in publishing B.S., the Internet’s going to get more B.S. As one of my colleagues put it, "'Too good to check' used to be a warning to newspaper editors not to jump on bullshit stories. Now it’s a business model."