Fakers and phonies in the news.

Posted at 10:53 AM on October 30, 2012 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)

This has been quite a 24 hours for people who fake things.

Hurricane Sandy, of course, brought all the phony image-people out. If you saw an image of the storm on Twitter, there was a pretty good chance it was fake so that by the end of the day yesterday, a normal person (people who don't have a thing about creating fake images) had zero faith in the medium.

The old media wasn't having much better of a time, at least when it reported the New York Stock Exchange was under three feet of water. It wasn't.

But there were more.

We found out last night (h/t: Ben Chorn) that Ray Dolin of Julian, W.Va. is a phony, too. I mentioned him on 5x8 weeks ago because he's hitchhiking across the country, he said, to do research on a memoir about the kindness of strangers, only a stranger shot him in Montana. That story was fake.

He admitted that he was trying to kill himself by trying to shoot himself in the heart and he missed, and wounded himself in the arm. He insists his memoir project is real, but there aren't enough suckers in Montana to believe him.

And, finally, there's Kyle Wood, the openly gay campaign worker for a Wisconsin Republican, who got some media attention yesterday because he was beaten up by at his home in Madison by two liberal gay men. He way lying, it's been revealed.

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Comments (2)

The Balloon Boy incident made me realize there are too many people out there who are thirsty for fame.

Posted by Tyler | October 30, 2012 11:19 AM

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And then, there was this fellow.

Posted by John O. | October 30, 2012 12:38 PM

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