Media fall for Avatar joke
Newspapers and TV shows fell for the Tweed Daily News April Fools Day story about an Avatar sequel being shot “in bushland to the north-west of Murwillumbah”.
“It talks about the power and the danger of the internet, where people just pick things up and run with them rather than actually checking the stories,” Tweed Daily News editor Natalie Gauld told Encore.
Encore saw the story this morning but realised it was an April Fools Day joke. However, publications such as The Brisbane Times, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age did not and reported it on their websites. The links are now dead, but a Google search still shows these results(searching “Brisbane Times” Avatar or “Sydney Morning Herald” Avatar) as seen in this screen capture:
“The Brisbane Times website fell for it and passed it on to their sister Fairfax websites. Our online division told them it was a joke, and as far as we know they didn’t realise it until we contacted them, and then they took it off,” said Gauld. “Channel 7 even rang the council to verify if the filming was taking place.”
According to Gauld, they thought they were giving readers enough clues to know it was a joke, such as the supposed title Avatar II: Blue Mountain Love, or the fact they would “have to cut down ‘a few football fields’ worth of rainforest to make way for production”, and that the source was James Cameron’s astrologist.
Gauld believes the media fell for the joke because of the timing – Avatar star Sam Worthington just announced he has signed up to do the sequel – and because Cameron did come to Queensland early last month, to visit the set of Sanctum, which he’s executive-producing.
“The two together just gave it that little bit more believability,” explained Gauld, who added that they also ran an online poll where 75 percent of people thought it was a great idea for the project to be shot in the region.
The Tweed Daily News website experienced a “dramatic” increase in traffic today.
