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.
