Batboy, Goodbye: Weekly World News R.I.P.
July 26, 2007Sad to hear the Weekly World News is gone (or gone to the Web, far from the supermarket racks but at home with the other rumor-mongers) I had just bought a copy for my 8-year old. We had chuckles over the cover story about how “President Kennedy is alive and fighting for the U.S. Navy in Iraq”–that’s one you’d really like to believe was true.
The technical term for stories like that are “too good to check.”
Of course, the Weekly World News, which bills billed itself as the “world’s most reliable newspaper”, never checked anything. When I had my orientation at the National Enquirer in lovely Lantana, Florida, back in the 1980’s, I asked where the reporters for their ’sister’ publication, the WWN, were.
A bloated reporter jerked his thumb towards a distant room: “They make it up over there.”
