A Swift kick: phony news hits home
As a sucker who once fell for an Internet hoax --in retrospect, the fluttering North Korean flag in the corner of the ''Stalinist" website I wrote about in 2002 should have tipped me off -- I ought to sympathize with Rush Limbaugh, the Drudge Report, MSNBC, and others who have reported on phony news emanating from the Swift Report website (swiftreport.blogs.com).
Just last week Swift got plenty of traction from a phony press release issued by the ''Coalition for Traditional Values," which decried the racy allusions in Laura Bush's speech to the White House Correspondents' Association. The super-serious and very real Traditional Values Coalition (''Empowering People of Faith Through Knowledge") wasn't amused. ''TVC Victimized by Phony Press Release Criticizing First Lady Laura Bush," the Washington-based lobbying organization contended.
Poor dears. Don't they know the Golden Rule of the digital age? On the Internet, no one can hear you lying.
The Swift Report flows mainly from the pen of Arlington's own Jennifer Berkshire. Ms. B is a freelance journalist who has been plowing the fertile ground of fake news with her Chicago-based Web partner, Matt Howard, since November. Berkshire writes under the nom de plume ''Deanna Swift," the fictional wife of Jonathan Swift, himself something of a wit and hoaxster in the pre-Internet era.
As recently as 1984, some audience members walked out of a reading of Swift's ''A Modest Proposal," his famous 1729 essay suggesting that Ireland's overpopulation and undernourishment might best be addressed by eating babies.
In addition to the cruel hoax perpetrated on the TVC, the Swift Report made headlines in March when it announced that the Rapture -- the putative moment when good Christians will be taken up into heaven -- ''may have happened earlier this month" at the Spring Hill Baptist Church in Kansas. (This followed an earlier Swift Report revelation: ''White House Exploring Rapture Contingency Plans.") Let's just say they are lucky that the very real Rev. Steve Satterfield, pastor of the real, not particularly Rapture-driven Spring Hill Baptist Church, has a sense of humor. ''I think it's pretty humorous," says Satterfield, ''and we did get a retraction."
Well, sort of. The problem with fake news sites is that their fake ombudsmen publish fake retractions. ''After receiving hundreds of complaints from outraged readers who'd been 'left behind,' an editorial investigation determined that the Swift Report had failed to follow basic journalistic principles in the preparation and reporting of the piece," the non-retraction read.
Berkshire's next order of business? Making money, obviously. For the moment, the site is advertising-free, although not by design. You can buy Swift Report paraphernalia (''Be American. Buy Stuff") off of the site, and Berkshire reports that items have been selling briskly: ''Our relatives have been especially generous."
Intelligent design
High-level business at the World's Greatest University: Alan Altshuler, the new dean of Harvard's, um, Design School, tackled a ''key agenda item" at the April faculty meeting -- the school's name. I had always thought it was called the Graduate School of Design, but apparently there was some ''nomenclature drift" under Altshuler's predecessor, Peter Rowe, who allowed GSD to be called the Harvard Design School.
''Having heard from numerous quarters that this situation was quite confusing, I asked whether the faculty found it so," Altshuler reported in a memo to the professorate. ''We then turned to the question of which [name]. I offered to appoint a committee, but it appeared that most people had clear views and preferred to vote. . . . The vote was lopsided in favor of Graduate School of Design."
I phoned Altshuler's office to find out who would be running the gajillion sheets of HDS stationery through the shredder (to say nothing of rejiggering the website), but as of this writing, no one has gotten back to me.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 