Sometimes, Twitter just can’t take a joke. That’s led to things like the Pirates’ broadcasters reading a fake Joe Maddon quote from CBS’ Tom Fornelli and the Daily Mail falling for a fake Chrissy Teigen quote on LeBron heading to the Lakers. On Wednesday, that led to a bunch of media outlets picking up a joke tweet from Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl (seen above) as serious reporting, from England’s The Sun to El Nuevo Herald (the Miami Herald‘s sister paper) to Univision. Here’s Wahl’s commentary on that:
Made what I thought was pretty clearly a joke (see below). Pretty crazy how many global media outlets ran with serious stories reporting USA is pursuing Mourinho, citing the tweet ? https://t.co/wEFMiTBNVe https://t.co/9OLy4AYcjF
— Grant Wahl (@GrantWahl) October 3, 2018
It’s pretty funny that outlets are again falling all over a joke like this, but hey, that’s the world we live in, apparently. Here’s an excerpt from the piece in The Sun:
Respected Sports Illustrated magazine claimed the association is on the brink of making Mourinho an offer in the wake of United’s draw with Valencia.
Senior writer Grant Wahl tweeted: “US Soccer’s master plan to wait for Jose Mourinho’s availability before it hires anyone for the US MNT [men’s national team] job appears to be on course.”
Apparently, there are plenty of people willing to take jokes as serious reports. And that’s not so great for the state of the world.
[Grant Wahl on Twitter]
