4

The New York Times Sends A Reporter Undercover ... To Find Out What Brooklyn Is Like

In 2013, The New York Times told one of their 50-year-old Manhattanite writers to spend a weekend in Brooklyn, just like ... pretending to live in Brooklyn. As if there's some team of roving bouncers that wanders the borough, ejecting those who don't belong.

In the course of his too-wacky-to-be-allowed picaresque, The Times' man on the scene rents a fixed-gear bicycle, tells the clerk of a ridiculously expensive clothing store that he wants to "look like Mumford and Sons," and informs his waitress "I was sort of hoping you'd be naked" -- ostensibly because there was a news story about that once, but really because he's an old creeper.

Casey Kelbaugh/The New York TimesIn a few short paragraphs, he manages the impossible and becomes a judgmental douche by Williamsburg hipster standards.

3

The Wall Street Journal Absolutely Freaked Out Over Citi Bikes

If you don't live in New York City, you might not know or care about Citi Bikes. They're bare-bones rent-a-bike kiosks that presumably curb the city's emissions output a little, and generally don't do much else. That is, unless you're the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, who are goddamn fired up over Citi Bikes. You don't win 39 Pulitzer prizes without learning to recognize what hills are worth dying on, and in 2013, WSJ picked themselves a hill and wrote themselves a will.

In an unintentionally hilarious video titled "Death By Bicycle," Dorothy Rabinowitz -- both looking and sounding exactly like you'd imagine a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board would -- depicts Citi Bikes as cryptofascist death machines that are "begriming" New York City. You know, because of how clean New York was before the bikes came along.

Rabinowitz goes on to describe the bike share program as "totalitarian," ominously warns "the bike lobby is an all-powerful enterprise," and assures her interviewer, "I represent the majority of citizens." She also describes then-mayor Michael Bloomberg as an "autocrat," for good measure.

To be fair to The Wall Street Journal, they did begin to warm to Citi Bikes after a few years. But there was a brief moment there in 2013 when they tried to start a revolution over a bunch of dirty bicycles, and we should never let them forget it.

2

The Daily Beast Outed A Bunch Of Closeted Athletes For No Apparent Reason

Every few years, reporters all across the world get a free vacation to go and report on the Olympics. It's a pretty low-stakes gig. "Feel-Good Story About A Gymnast," "Expose On Figure Skating Judges," and maybe "In-Depth Analysis Of Who Exactly Gives A Damn About Curling." Boom. Done. Time to hit the bar.

U.S. Army“Think we could make this a 50-meter sprint? It’s $5 pitchers at the fencing arena right now.”

1

The WHO Once Claimed Greek People Were Infecting Themselves With HIV For Cash

Six years ago, the World Health Organization let everybody in on some rather shocking news: About half of all the new HIV cases in Greece were self-inflicted. That's right, people were giving themselves HIV in order to suckle on the sweet money-teat of their nanny state. Naturally, Fox Business, Rush Limbaugh, Al Jazeera, Drudge Report, and The Daily Mail ran with this story unchecked ... because look at the names of those media outlets again.

EIB NetworkClearly we’re in for a civil, evidence-based response.

It was a total blockbuster story, but there was one small problem: It was all lies. It only took about 24 hours of real investigative journalism to upend the assertion, because of course hundreds of Greek people weren't giving themselves HIV. Fox Business jabbed a condemning finger at the WHO, because they really didn't need any help looking like idiots, at which point the WHO scrambled to retract their whole "AIDS? More Like 'Made In The Shades" expose.

It turns out that one sentence in the WHO report -- the one about half of all HIV cases being self-inflicted -- was quoting another report in The Lancet. Meanwhile, that Lancet report was itself quoting a third report by an organization called the Hellenic Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Problem was, every time the passage got re-quoted, it became more and more inflammatory.

The original report read: "An additional factor the committee believed worth considering is the well-founded suspicion that some problem users are intentionally infected with HIV." But there was no data attached to that claim; it was nothing but a suspicion some committee had. Then, when The Lancet quoted that report, the assertion became: "An authoritative report described accounts of deliberate self-infection by a few individuals to obtain access to benefits of 700 euro per month and faster admission onto drug substitution programmes." That escalation finally mutated into the WHO's weirdly specific: "HIV rates and heroin use have risen significantly, with about half of new HIV infections being self-inflicted to enable people to receive benefits of 700 euro per month and faster admission on to drug-substitution programmes."

So the claim went from "Our committee has this crazy hunch that somewhere out there, some lazy Greek bastard is giving himself HIV in exchange for $1,000 a month" to "An authoritative study proves that some Greek people give themselves HIV for drugs and money" to "HALF OF ALL GREEK PEOPLE ARE GIVING THEMSELVES HIV, THE RATS ARE IN THE CORN, ABANDON ALL HOPE."

J.C. Breen lives and works in New York City. If you liked this article, be sure to follow this here link to his website, where you can dig through his more alienating, less financially viable work.

You can still die by bicycle. Wear a helmet.

If you loved this article and want more content like this, support our site with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.

For more check out 6 Times The News Went Totally Overboard Chasing A Story and 5 Deeply Embarrassing Things The News Keeps Doing.

Also follow us on Facebook, because we're awesome.