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Does anyone do background checks anymore...or do they just want to tell a story, regardless of the facts?

Oprah, CNN, New York Times, PBS, Time Magazine...all suckers.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/30/world/asi ... ro-resign/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

She was the world's crusader against the trafficking of girls for sex in Cambodia, and she told an extraordinary personal tale: she was a village girl sold by a grandfatherly man into sex slavery.
Triumphant as well as beautiful, Somaly Mam won attention from Oprah Winfrey, a New York Times columnist, a PBS documentary, Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2009, and even CNN, which named her a "Hero" in 2007.
The fame -- and her memoir "The Road of Lost Innocence" -- generated millions of dollars for her Somaly Mam Foundation, fighting sex traffickers.
But her personal story wasn't true, according to a Newsweek exposé this month

In fact, Mam arrived with a family and lived a normal life in the village from 1981 until 1987, when she finished high school and then took a teachers exam, according to a commune chief, childhood friends, a cousin and a school official interviewed by Newsweek.
Furthermore, "Mam was well-known and popular in their small village, a happy, pretty girl with pigtails," Newsweek reported.
Those villagers' accounts differed from the horrific personal narrative that Mam told the media and readers of her memoir.
In an interview with CNN on Friday, Marks said he spoke with "to dozens of villagers, former teachers, commune chiefs, who all say that they witnessed Somaly Mam arrive in the village."
"They say that they saw her arrive in the village with a family, she grew up in the village living a relatively normal life," said Marks, who's a contributor to Newsweek.

False claims by "rescued" girls

Some of the girls and young women whom Mam rescued from slavery were used in testimonials promoting Mam's foundation, but at least one of those girls later "confessed that her story was fabricated and carefully rehearsed for the cameras under Mam's instruction," Newsweek reported.
Meas Ratha portrayed herself on a French television program in 1998 as a teenager who had been sold to a brothel and was forced to become a sex slave, but last year, Ratha said the foundation chose her to go on television after auditioning her, the magazine said.
In fact, Ratha was never a sex slave. Her parents couldn't care for their seven children so they sent Ratha and her sister in 1997 to a refuge center of group called Agir Pour Les Femmes en Situation Precaire, or AFESIP (Helping Women in Danger), whose then president and co-founder was Mam, Newsweek said.
Now in her early 30s in Phnom Penh, Ratha told Newsweek she reluctantly agreed to the fake story about being a child sex slave: "Somaly said that...if I want to help another woman I have to do [the interview] very well," she told the magazine.
Ratha wasn't the only purported rescued girl telling fictions, according to the magazine..

Cluck U wrote:...or do they just want to tell a story, regardless of the facts?

When I got out of college, I worked as a sportswriter for a newspaper for a while, before going to law school.

I worked with this guy -- great guy, fun to hang with, great writer, and always seemed to find the great angle to the story.

One night, around Christmas time, we were hanging in his car before going into the company's Christmas party. He was toking on a joint while we spoke about a great story he wrote which ran that day, about a high school basketball player who had suffered an awful brain injury but had come back in his senior year, better than ever.

It was an amazing story, but I said, "But the facts really helped you out." His story had all this resurrection imagery working throughout, leading to the end of the story, with kid coming out of his coma on Easter Sunday. "I mean, coming out of the coma on Easter? You can't ask for better facts."

So he takes a slow hit, and then says, "Well, he did come out of the coma in March, but it was on a Wednesday two weeks before Easter. But my resurrection imagery in the story only worked if it tied to the event happening on Easter."

Oh.

So a few years later, I'm watching this kid play college ball on ESPN, and Dickie V tells the story as it was written, and then says, after alluding to all the resurrection imagery, "And then, amazingly, he comes out of the coma on Easter!"

PS -- A little sleuthing, and you could figure out who this is. He played in the NBA and even made an all-star team.

Anyone who trusts a human interest story coming out of ANYWHERE in the developing world without CAREFULLY vetting all angles of it is a sucker of epic magnitude.

Especially talking about Cambodia, Vietnam, and their soul mates in sub-Sahel Africa (like Nigeria).

CID1990 wrote:Anyone who trusts a human interest story coming out of ANYWHERE in the developing world without CAREFULLY vetting all angles of it is a sucker of epic magnitude.

Not just today. How about those stories about Fidel Castro, circa. 1959.