The Guardian video: Gay Girl in Damascus hoaxer - Edinburgh-based American student Tom MacMaster, 40, talks to the Guardian's Esther Addley via Skype, and explains why he pretended to be a lesbian Syrian blogger with the A Gay Girl in Damascus blog and claimed to have been kidnapped.
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"You can't con an honest man" - Phineas T. "P.T." Barnum
American hoaxster Tom MacMaster completely fools the Mainstream Media not by claiming to be a 'Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,' but by playing on their latent news/political bias and claiming to be a lesbian blogger in Syria -who was kidnapped!
News media can't get out of their own way fast enough, disavow the expected wariness and vetting and swallows in one large gulp!
Well played, sir, well played!
Still, in the end, that hoax was not nearly as insidious as the one perpetrated on the American people by John Edwards of North Carolina, the future prison-yard lawyer and celebrity, who was exposed not by the dogged investigation and muckraking of the Washington Post or NPR or the New York Times or ABC News or... but by The National Enquirer.
I mention them just in case you forgot who did the real sleuthing.
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The Guardian
Gay Girl in Damascus hoaxer acted out of 'vanity'
Tom MacMaster, heterosexual American, contrite over fictional lesbian blogger 'Amina Abdallah Aral al Omari'
By Esther Addley, guardian.co.uk
Monday 13 June 2011 16.58 BST
The male American PhD student who confessed to being an internet hoaxer masquerading as a lesbian blogger in Damascus has spoken publicly about the reasons behind his deception, saying he was motivated, in part, by his own "vanity".
Read the rest of the story at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/13/gay-girl-damascus-tom-macmasterSee also:
Panic Attacks: Media Manipulation and Mass Delusion, by Robert E Bartholomew & Hilary Evans.
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