Thousands of Bibles Reach Nepal And Satire Makes It To News

If you are here reading this, there is not a chance in hell that you haven’t read the story over hundred thousand Gideon bibles being shipped to Nepal. “Nepal quake: Missionaries send bibles as relief as food and not water”, screamed India TV’s headline.

News Nation also carried the story: “a shocking incident over 100,00 paperback editions of Gideon Bibles have arrived in Nepal”.

Yes, shocking indeed because news organisations fell for what was actually a satirical piece in The Lapine, a Canadian satire website. The Lapine, though, has since taken down the story. The URL of the original page, however, does confirm that the story was carried by the website.

A story on Patheos, a religion website, has set the record straight. The author of the story contacted a representative of Gideon International who said that they have printing operations in Nepal itself. The representative also said that Gideon International used container ships and not planes to ship bibles.

Noted ethologist Richard Dawkins also called it out overseas.

India TV’s story is no longer available on its website.  News Nation, though, hasn’t yet bothered to retract the story.

However, this is hardly the first time that our news organisations have taken satire a tad too seriously.

In December 2013, the India Today website copy pasted a Faking News article about the Indian Railways’ ticket booking website slowing down because of the fog in Delhi.  Well, not the website but the fog clearly did slow down someone else.

Last year November, the India Today website did it again. It rehashed a Times of India satirical piece about Arvind Kejriwal gifting a car to Ashutosh. To be fair, this one must have been a tricky one, considering Kejriwal’s track record of giving away freebies.

In May 2011, Times of India published a Faking News story  about a man suing the deodorant company, Axe, because in spite of applying abundant   amounts of the deodorant, he wasn’t successful in wooing women.  We hope it gave no one at Axe a heart attack.

The author can be contacted at arunabh.saikia90@gmail.com and on Twitter @Psychia90