Media Watch: A comedy of errors and then some

The Dependent, this paper’s satirical sister publication, has been in operation for nearly two years now. And from the day of its inception in back February 2017 to the filing of this piece, one issue has persisted for team Dependent: People actually believing the satire to be true.

Naturally, the great minds behind The Dependent, had thought two steps ahead. When it was launched, it was decided that each piece would be accompanied by a disclaimer. But what team Dependent did not count upon was the sheer tenacity of those that insist upon being unintentionally fooled by satire.

As the days went by, those over at the Dependent devised new means of making it painfully obvious that everything was being meant to taken in good humour. Disclaimer upon disclaimer was added. One at the beginning of every story, one on every facebook post and a glaring, red ‘SATIRE’ written on top of every image used along with the pieces. Needless to say, team Dependent was being a bit extra, but for good reason.

America’s The Onion operates on a no disclaimer policy. They have been taken for real on numerous occasions to both hilarious and temporarily terrifying results.   

Yet the believers persisted. Some smart-alecs decided that they would tell the word this was ‘fake news’ and others decided to ignore the multiple disclaimers. All else aside, team Dependent decided it would never be shocked by gullible users ever again.

One thing that they never did expect, however, was to be monitored off. Yet the situation arose sometime in this week that a number of different news channels, those shining bastions of integrity and defenders of the truth, ran news items based on ‘reports’ filed by The Dependent.

When news started to break that Pakistani-American billionaire Shahid Khan had decided to donate a billion dollars to the PM-CJP dam fund, it should have been obvious that it was fake news. Yet it is a comment on the veracity of fake news in the country that it spread like wildfire.

Thinking that poor old Shahid Khan’s angels probably couldn’t imagine anything close to this, The Dependent ran a story: “Jaani WTF” says Shahid Khan after waking up and reading facebook notifications.

It was, admittedly, funny. But the reaction was not what was expected. People started taking the piece as actual news, with the anti-dam lot sharing it with told-you-so caption, blaring red disclaimer and all. The piece became what can only be described as viral, getting tens of thousands of shares over night.

The giddiness of the team was made all the more merry when news channels started monitoring it. Geo news ran pictures of Shahid Khan along with claims that the Jaguars owner had “refuted all claims” and had actually “tried to donate $1000 but had failed because of an IBAN error” – both taken directly from the body of The Dependent’s story. Other channels followed suit and The Dependent looked on in amusement. When it got real crazy was when Channel 24 not only ran the news of Shahid Khan’s ‘rejection’ of the news, but also ran with it a screenshot taken from The Dependent’s website. Disclaimer and all, the good gentlemen of the electronic media ran a satirical piece done by The Dependent as hard news.

And while we’ve been hung up on them seemingly just not seeing the disclaimers, it really should have been obvious when the headline included the phrase ‘Jaani WTF.’