Perhaps I am too serious and somber, but I just cannot find the fun and frivolity in journalists playing April Fool’s Day pranks on their readers these days.

I know of at least one April Fool’s Day “joke” column in today’s Star. Having written my own column a couple of days before this annual celebration of pranks and practical jokes, there may well be more high jinks at play for you today that I was unaware of before my deadline. Certainly, there are many journalists at the Star with a better sense of humour than me — and perhaps they are less grim about the grave dangers to our credibility of fooling readers with pretend news for even just one day.

Truth is our currency — the foundation of our credibility. In this time of concern, confusion and complaints about fake news, why would we present false news as real and seek to fool readers into believing something that is untrue is true? Just for laughs?

I know we can all use a good laugh most any day, but with trust in the media at an all time low, and a United States president happy to try to delegitimize journalism, this would seem to be a time to step back from the tradition of media organizations making mischief with made-up stories on April 1 and remember that the Toronto Star is definitely not The Onion, the farcical U.S. newspaper and website.

Have you found the April Fool’s Day column published in today’s Star or are you now outraged about the cruelty of cats? If so, please consider the calendar and don’t call the public editor. And if there is some other playful prank published elsewhere in the Star, I don’t want to hear about that either. Likely, I won’t be amused.

To be fair, the tongue-in-cheek column I was informed about earlier this week is relatively innocuous. I do not have significant concerns about its publication. It is not the news sections and it’s not pretending to be news. I think you will figure out that it is a joke fairly quickly and allow yourself a smile and chuckle.

Inevitably, the fact that it is April Fool’s Day will lead to some confusion for readers in any event. Most years, there is some strange, but true, story published on April 1 that leads to readers questioning whether it was an April Fool’s joke. Indeed, some of the real news from the U.S. these days often does read like a bad joke.

Certainly Star journalists will need to be vigilant today not to report April 1 hoaxes carried out by others as real news. In recent years, many corporations have hoped to make headlines with elaborate April Fool’s Day ruses. Remember, a few years back when Ikea recalled its erroneously issued “left-handed Allen key,” which must be swapped for the correct right-handed version?

The Star has not resisted the call to play the joker on April Fool’s Day of past. On April 1, 1976, our front page carried a picture of King Kong clinging to the top of the CN Tower. In 1979, Star columnist Frank Jones wrote that prehistoric creatures were being driven by radiation out of Lake Ontario onto the shores of Ward’s Island.

Other April 1 jokes sought to fool with false images — a streetcar on the Gardiner Expressway, a whale in Toronto harbour with a photo caption telling readers, “the huge mammals are being lured to the Great Lakes by unseasonably warm weather,” a “new million-dollar Leafs rookie” suited up for play: then 80-year-old team owner Harold Ballard.

These pranks were played in a long tradition of April Fool’s jokes by media organizations. In 1950, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin reported that a flying saucer had crashed into a crater on the island of Oahu. In 1971, France’s state-run radio announced the country would switch to driving on the left side of the road. In 1975, The Times of London reported that the U.K.’s largest travel company, Thomas Cook, was selling $575 round-the-world trips to see the newly discovered remains of Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster. In 1980, the BBC told the world that the Big Ben clock was going digital.

My favourite story from the April Fool’s files was a newspaper in the Netherlands that told its readers one April 1 that on that day it had started to use a new ink that smelled like tulips. Not surprisingly, some noses were out of joint by that prank.

Admittedly, those were all amusing efforts. But that was then and this is now, a time when we know media credibility is at stake. In this digital era when information spreads around the globe in seconds and lives on forever online, serious news organizations should not play around with far-fetched fake news just for laughs.

After all, the news is serious business. I’m not kidding you.