With the advent of the Internet, the situation has changed so that instead of powerful media moguls spreading bullshit, pretty much anybody can do it. After all, if the story is good enough, the mainstream media will report it, no matter how transparently retarded it is.

In the olden days when shoes were a luxury and smallpox was a right of passage, men like William Randolph Hearst used their complete control over communication airwaves to tell the general populace whatever lie happened to be convenient (see marijuana is evil ) or interesting (see below).

7 Thirteen-Year-Old Uses His Dad's Credit Card to Buy Two Halo-Playing Hookers

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The Story:

A boy in Texas stole his father's identity, obtained a credit card, and took his friends on a whirlwind-shopping spree of video games, electronic gadgets and two $1,000-an-hour hookers. It might not have been enough to hook the media if it weren't for an additional to-good-to-be-true detail: he didn't hire them for a night of wild sex. He only needed someone to play some Halo with him.



"Oh, so when you said 'joystick,' you meant... OK, I understand now."

The Police finally caught the boy and several of his friends before the hookers could show them five ways to please a man with a "Gravity Hammer." Given the adorable little "we only needed a fourth player" plot-twist, we can understand why someone might want to believe the story. But there's also the ending, which would make Michael Bay and the entire Church of Scientology call bullshit. Allegedly, the hookers weren't charged because the boys convinced them they were really a group of midgets from a traveling circus seeking some non-sexual companionship.

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The Truth:

Internet marketer and writer Lyndon Anticliff dreamed up the whole story as part of a ploy to get some quick hits to his site, which according to Wired garnered him roughly 6,000 links. The coverage reached such staggering heights that he had to put a disclaimer on the story that the whole thing was intended to be a parody and satirical, two concepts that are completely lost on news outlets like Fox News.

The story appeared on the network's late night gabfest "Red Eye" where the network's judicial analyst, Jeanine Pirro, wondered why the hookers weren't thrown in a furnace occupied by hungry lions, while the show's four remaining male-panelists wondered why the police didn't bestow the boy with a knighthood.