Have you noticed how few big April Fools’ Day hoaxes the media run nowadays?
Remember the Channel 7 Blue Hills volcano panic of 1980, when the station took some stock video from Mount St. Helens and caused a near stampede south of the city?
Then there was the Mayor-Menino-has-been-killed-in-a-car-accident “joke” in 1998 by a couple of third-rate morning DJ’s on a fourth-rate radio station.
People got fired over such nonsense. Which is no doubt part of the reason why April Fools’ Day isn’t what it used to be.
But I think there’s another reason why the whole phenomenon has been fading away.
In state-run media now, every day is April Fools’ Day. Think about it.
President Trump colluded with the Russians. April Fools!
Hunter Biden’s laptop isn’t real, it’s Russian disinformation. April Fools!
Donald Trump called for a “bloodbath” against American citizens. April Fools!
If you get the vaccination, you’ll never get COVID. April Fools!
The Russians offered Carter Page $11 billion for an introduction to then-candidate Trump. April Fools!
All the schools must be closed because COVID is going to kill all the kids. April Fools!
President Trump called the Georgia secretary of state and said, “Find the fraud.” April Fools!
Half the people in Massachusetts’ “migrant shelters” are American citizens. April Fools!
It never ends. Last Friday, Good Friday, the White House issued on the official presidential website a proclamation declaring Sunday Transgender Day of Visibility.
Here’s how it read, and still reads:
“Now, therefore, I, Joseph R. Biden Jr., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 31, 2024, as Transgender Day of Visibility.”
This did not go over well, as you might expect. On Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson tweeted out that doing issuing such a proclamation for Easter Sunday was “outrageous and abhorrent.”
The next day was April 1, so perhaps it was only appropriate that the president, after introducing what he called the “Oyster Bunnies” at the White House, then totally denounced the Speaker.
“He is thoroughly uninformed,” Biden babbled. “I didn’t do that.”
He didn’t do that? It’s posted on Biden’s own website. He followed it up with a tweet on Easter Sunday, and so did the vice president.
He didn’t do that? April Fools!
But they can’t help themselves, even when it’s not April Fools’ Day. Biden’s press secretary was asked about the proclamation on Monday and three times she used the word “misinformation.”
To repeat, the Republicans were quoting the White House’s own proclamation, on their own website, and it becomes “misinformation.”
April Fools!
Wrinkly Democrat hack James Carville added: “I don’t think Biden knew… I don’t even think anyone knew about the transgender proclamation.”
Was the White House website hacked then? Like when Joy Reid of MSNBC was caught sending out homophobic tweets years earlier, and she blamed it on “hackers.” Time-traveling hackers, I guess.
State-run media lapped it up with a spoon. Ronna McDaniel gets fired after one shot on NBC/MSNBC because she’s an election denier, but Stacey Abrams and Hillary Clinton and all the Congressmen who voted not to certify Republican victories in 2000, 2004 and 2016 get the red carpet rolled out for them.
Because they’re the right kind of election deniers.
April Fools!
But Ronna McDaniel was lying publicly. That’s why MSNBC had to get rid of the former RNC chairwoman.
Because they would never hire anyone who had no credibility and had a record of publicly lying, you know, like Al Sharpton or Mike Barnicle or Jen Psaki or Rachel Maddow or Lawrence O’Donnell.
The Democrat operatives with press passes all give themselves big prizes now for making stuff up. The Russian collusion hoaxers all picked up Pulitzer Prizes.
This is why April Fools’ Day stunts no longer work. When lying is expected, indeed even encouraged, why risk becoming the next Opie and Anthony, or Skip Cilley (the assistant news director at Ch. 7 who was thrown into the volcano to protect anchor John Henning, whose silly idea it really was)?
The lies are so non-stop that, let’s face it, nobody believes anything they read or hear anymore. Forget April Fools’ Day, reporters used to get fired for making bleep up. Then the rules changed and you could make bleep up, and it wasn’t a firing offense anymore.
Just ask Kevin Cullen.
Last week, a former New York congressman named Patrick Murphy went on Fox News and announced “Five Capitol Police officers were killed on Jan. 6.”
That was a flat-out lie. Only one person was killed on Jan. 6, and it was a female Trump supporter and Air Force veteran named Ashli Babbitt.
Nobody at Fox even bothered to correct the horrible falsehood. Maybe, like Dementia Joe Biden, they just didn’t know.
When the news is all April Fools’ Day all the time, there are consequences.
Remember when the Muslim terrorists bombed their own hospital in Gaza last fall with misguided rockets. The missile landed in the parking lot and killed a few dozen people, but knowing how much state-run media love to lie, Hamas immediately said “hundreds” were dead in a deliberate Israeli strike.
The only paper to run a bigger, more dishonest headline than the Wall Street Journal was The New York Times. There were riots all over the world.
April Fools!
It didn’t stop Hamas. Last month, there was another hospital, and this time they said the IDF was raping women inside. Again, the lie went around the world in the morning while the truth was putting its pants on.
How can you make up a fake news story for April Fools Day when the real fake news is so much fakier, day after day after day, all year long?
Poor Skip Cilley of Channel 7. He was a man ahead of his time.