Well here’s some sloppy reporting from the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), with the SMH website reporting that Meg White, “drummer” of the White Stripes, was the ‘star’ of the latest celebrity sex video doing the rounds.
As of writing this, the SMH “Meg White sex video claim” story is the second most viewed story on the SMH website. The story was first published on the SMH site at 12.30pm on the 26 September. The article signs off with:
“Representatives for the band are yet to confirm or deny the video is genuine.”
“Meg White sex video claim“, The Sydney Morning Herald, September 26, 2007 — 10.30pm.
I have to say, it’s an attention grabbing story, I guess the only problem is that it’s not all that accurate.
What’s wrong with the story you ask? Well, anyone with access to Google, which I’m assuming is readily accessible by the people at SMH headquarters, can tell you within about 30 seconds that the “sex video” is a fake. In fact, it took me all of 30 seconds to find a statement from The White Stripes publicist Chloe Walsh:
“Some people have a very twisted sense of humor and this prank is in particularly bad taste. The tape circulating on the internet as featuring Meg White is fake. It’s definitely not Meg.”
Statement released by White Stripes publicist Chloe Walsh, quoted here, here and here (amongst many other publications).
You can also find similar sentiments on the PitchFork Media website, and countless others if you can be bothered surfing around for more than 30 seconds!
Now did you pick up on the date that The White Stripes publicist released the statement? Yahuh, the 24 September 2007. Now even when you take into account the timezone difference, SMH went ahead and published their story stating that “Representatives for the band are yet to confirm or deny the video is genuine” almost two days after the publicist came out and said that the video didn’t feature Meg White. So yes, very sloppy effort SMH!
Actually, if anyone from SMH reads this, here is the story behind the now infamous – not actually Meg White – sex tape. It all started with a guy (‘Itsmecraig’) who was a frequent visitor to the Hipinion internet forum. This guy posted a video at that forum, with the post title “MEG WHITE SEX TAPE” (WARNING: not everything on that page is ‘work safe’). So this happens on the 17 September. For the next day or two a few of the frequent forum visitors posted the obvious jokes that you might come to make (eg. “that can’t be Meg White, that girl can keep rhythm”).
It wasn’t long before the thread was “wiki’d” and not long after the sex tape story was picked up as ‘fact’ by a number of outlets. Things obviously snowballed from there.
Then on the 24 September, “Itsmecraig” checked back in on his one week old thread:
oh sh!t dudes,
i found this video through random wank mining efforts and put it up here cause i figured you guys would have a laugh. it had nothing to do with meg white when i found it.
So there you go, a random guy, posts a random porn video, labels it as a celebrity, and it gets picked up and run worldwide as news. It’s both funny and sad that news outlets didn’t bother to check if the story was based on fact at all! So the Sydney Morning Herald fail on two counts. They published old ‘news’ that had already been proven false. Sometimes the quality of Australian print media is laughable, I guess you could file the Meg White “sex tape” as exhibit A.