Today ABC News sent a camerateam around to my house to interview me about the
hoax execution of Benjamin Vanderford. Vanderford used special-effects to stage his own execution by Islamic militants, then uploaded footage of the scene onto file-sharing networks, and waited for the media to bite. It took three months, but the media finally did bite, reporting it as an actual execution yesterday. At which point, Vanderford confessed to the hoax. I got a call from ABC this morning asking if I'd be willing to do an interview. I had only just read about Vanderford's hoax a few minutes before they called, but I said sure, why not. About an hour later the camerateam was there. I haven't seen the news segment yet, but from what I hear they use a soundbite from me saying something about how digital technology makes video and photo hoaxes much easier to perpetrate. It's always frustrating to be soundbited, because there's so much more one could say about these types of events: how Vanderford's hoax is representative of the 'moral crusader' genre of hoax in which people justify their hoaxes by claiming they serve a moral, educational purpose; how the media will always, always fall for sensational hoaxes because of the 'if-it-bleeds-it-leads' news model; how the case of Vanderford demonstrates that access to the media (and thus the phenomenon of hoaxing itself) has become democratized by the internet (in the old days hoaxes were mostly perpetrated by people with insider connections to the media). Oh well. At least I got my face on the news. So I can't complain.
Update: Robert Martin, the producer of Vanderford's hoax video, has placed a
'press release' online, explaining their side of the story.
Comments
You were right... they did just use a tiny part of the interview where you talk about how digital stuff makes haoxing easier... what threw me off (unless I just missed it) was that they didn't actually mention your name, but I saw the webpage and recognised you from the pictures you've posted here recently. Maybe I just misconstrued it but for a second I thought it was implying that it was you that had posted the video. Hence the reason I jumped on here to check. Glad to find out you're not in strife 😊
In any case you got your face on the TV in Australia, so that's a plus 😉
You must have been thinking of Nick Berg.
Mary Toft (the 18th-century Englishwoman who claimed to give birth to litters of rabbits)comes to mind as an example of a (temporarily) very successful hoaxer who was definitely plebian. It seems all the self-proclaimed geniuses of the early 20th century who said they'd invented cars that ran on water and the like were mainly working-class types too.
One thing that is certain is that hoaxes can now spread faster and more widely than ever before-- but hasn't the ability to perpetrate a hoax always been open to any clever person?
It was only in the 1830s that newspapers even began to regularly report on 'local' news stories... i.e. stories relating to the affairs of the lower class. Mary Toft attracted the attention of the King of England as a one-of-a-kind medical curiosity, and that was why she became so celebrated.
Today you have people who whip up something in photoshop, email it to a friend, and a week or so later their creations have been seen around the world. So yeah, today the average person has to put far less effort into creating a hoax that can reach a mass audience than would have been the case two hundred years ago.