Iranian News Agency Duped by Onion Story

When we saw this post from Iran's semi-official Fars News Agency, we were pretty confused. Gallup, the propaganda outlet reported, had released a poll showing that rural whites preferred Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Barack Obama—in part because "they at least respected that Ahmadinejad doesn't try to hide the fact that he's a Muslim." That sounded pretty unlikely, but Fars is rarely quite that farcical in its propaganda efforts.

Thankfully, the Atlantic Wire cracked the case, noticing that the post was an almost word-for-word copy of this Onion article from Monday, with just two changes: The dateline now reads "Tehran," and they omitted a phrase describing Ahmadinejad as "a man who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and has had numerous political prisoners executed." Good catch, that. Including that line might have made Iran look bad or something. (More Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stories.)