NY Magazine and Rolling Stone "Ha, We're FULL OF SHIT"

Fact-checkers? Proofreaders? 20-somethings at "New York Magazine" and "Rolling Stone" know nothing about such things.

In fact (er, can I even use that word??) the "real world" of actual magazines has gotten as bogus and moronic as the Internet websites that are loaded with hoaxes and pfishing.

Ha ha ho ho hee hee. Publish stupid shit and apologize later. Maybe. Rolling Stone believed some chick's gang bang story, and then had to apologize because there were some leaky holes. Now "New York" magazine is apologizing because their obnoxious story about some diarrhea-faced monkey making 72 Million Dollars was a hoax:

One of the bane and pains of my career in books and magazines is how often I was irritated by editors and fact-checkers DEMANDING to know my sources, DEMANDING to know if I had a quote on tape, or DEMANDING that I provide a second source for some innocuous fucking sentence they were bent about.

Seriously, I sometimes had situations where I lost money because some pest was being pedantic and felt it was "better safe than sorry" over something I wrote that a) was the truth, and b) was not libelous and c) couldn't possibly be blown out of proportion by anyone.

Today? Today idiots take the word of other idiots. Nobody questions anything. What was this fucking story in "New York" about, anyway? It was just a "hey, here's a vicarious thrill, young geniuses are making a fortune in the stock market."

Who did it even hurt? That was the thinking, no doubt, from whoever got paid a few grand. Same deal with Rolling Stone. Girls ARE gang-raped after getting drunk or drugged. Are we sweating the details? Should we? Obviously the author of the story didn't think she was fabricating much, or that her "source" was lying to her.

Then it turns out it's either a BIG LIE, or there's enough crap to make it smell bad.

I actually had a professor who said that making stuff up was ok! His view was that if it enhances the story, it's better to have a fictional character than to present dry facts. For instance, if your article is about how 10 bicycles were stolen in your town in the past month, it would be ok to write:

"A young man told me that he chained his bike to a pole, and went in for a hamburger. Suddenly he heard the chain rattling, and he spilled his coffee, knocked his burger onto the floor, and chased out the door, diving at a blurry figure pedaling off on his bike. "Come back!" he shouted, only to hear, "Ha ha ho ho hee hee," from the fleeing cyclist now owning his bike. The reckless thief splashed puddle water on an old lady and nearly ran over someone's dog as he made his getaway."

There. Total fiction, but it livens up a dull story. Good idea?

The question becomes: how far do you take this? Where do you draw the line? Why hire somebody incompetent? Why is it that these days we shrug and ignore con artists who e-mail us with "pfishing" scams? We assign a cute word to a dangerous fucking problem. Are either of these writers disgraced? Did they have to give back the money? Could they just say it was a "spoof" or a "parody?"

Anyone separating fact from fiction these days? It's ALL under the big umbrella of "ENTERTAINMENT." We buy a newspaper not for information anymore but for...all together...AMUSEMENT.

How fuckin' DISGUSTING.