Iran's state-run FARS News Agency just published a shocking new Gallup Poll that was actually "conducted" by the fake news titans at The Onion. This FARS post from today (datelined Tehran) is a word-for-word copy of this article that went up on The Onion's website on Monday, headlined "Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad To Obama," joking that West Virginia voters would rather have a beer with the president of Iran than the leader of their own country. However, the FARS story does contain one slight omission— a phrase describing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as "a man who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and has had numerous political prisoners executed." It seems they were paying close enough attention to notice that, but not that The Onion likes to make stuff up. (Or maybe they know and just don't care.) We rate this #journalismfail as just slightly less embarrassing than the time an Iranian news agency accidentally Photoshopped Jar Jar Binks into a story about missile tests. Either way the Iranian media is in good company. They are hardly the first news outlet/United States Congressman to get duped by the paper's "too good to verify" journalism.

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Dashiell Bennett