The Patriot Post® · Hoaxes Abound

R. Emmett Tyrrell: “Will Rogers, the late American humorist and corn-pone philosopher, once said, ‘All I know is what I read in the papers.’ That statement earned him a place in Bartletts’s Familiar Quotations. Were he alive today it would most likely be inviting widespread derision. Today’s newspapers abound with bogus stories. … The story that originated in Italy’s Corriere della Sera and quickly traveled around the world claimed that Pope Francis, while attempting to console a grieving young boy who had lost his pet, asserted that heaven is open to pets. … Pope Francis never made the idiotic statement and there was no grief-stricken boy. The news story was based on a misreading of the pope’s general audience at the Vatican Nov. 26. Yet the Reverend Ciro Benedettini, a Vatican spokesman, did have a helpful bit of information for journalists. He said, ‘There is a fundamental rule in journalism. That is double-checking, and in this case it was not done.’ Nor was it done at New York magazine or at Rolling Stone, and, apparently, it will not be done at the University of Virginia’s campus newspaper. Thus we can anticipate more amusements from American journalists in the years to come.”