Published in News

Naked Mum pictures ?all a stunt?

by on21 July 2009

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Press falls for it


The media
machine which processes news has been caught out again by a young advertising student who was posing as a teen.

Last week the wires were all a flutter with a yarn about how a teen had flogged pictures of his mum online. The story was laced with quotes from the unnamed teen and his mum. Apparently she said that she had no problem with the pictures being sold. While the pictures of a woman were real, and they were sold on the New Zealand TradeMe. The rest of the story was invented by a 22 year old design student who wanted to get into advertising.

Michael Chal, 22, has fessed up to posing as a teenager and listed raunchy photos of a woman he claimed was his mother as revenge for having to clean out their garage. After a bit of digging it turned out that Chal is actually the son of a former MP and she is not the subject of the photos. According to the NZ Herald on Sunday today reported Chal pulled the stunt for a project to use social media to "get people chattering". The woman was not his mum but a friend.

If it had been his mum it would have been a front page story. Chal is the son of former United Future MP Kelly Chal, who was ousted from Parliament after just 17 days because she was not a New Zealand citizen. He submitted the 15 minutes of fame project to the Media Design School in the hope it might help him forge a career in advertising.

It seems to have backfired because course leader Kate Humphries said she was "99.9 per cent certain" he would fail the project, which was worth a fifth of his year's work. While he might fail academically the question as to how the kiwi press with its reputation for being 'dull', 'by the book', and obsessed with the authority of politicians managed to run this yarn has not been answered.
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