In September, Jimmy Kimmel fooled us all with this twerking fail video of a girl lighting herself on fire after her friend opened the door she was twerking on. I remember passing my phone around with friends laughing hysterically at the blunder. A few weeks later I discovered it was fake, and I remember feeling a little duped and disappointed. Then the Sochi wolf, potentially the most epic #SochiProblems tweet ever, got us again.
When it comes to capitalizing on popular trends, Kimmel has it down. Twerking was the hot thing in September when he released his hoax, and the #SochiProblems and #SochiFail hashtags were hugely trending throughout the Olympics. With thousands of people posting their twerking attempts to YouTube last year, nobody considered the possibility of an imposter. Similarly, with all of the outlandish (and completely true) tweets coming out of Sochi, everyone just accepted a wolf on the loose as another to add to the list.
So who's to blame: The journalists who Kimmel made a fool out of because they didn't check to make sure the wolf was legit, or Kimmel who intentionally and unashamedly posted fake footage, arguably to draw more attention to his late-night talk show?
Personally, I think it's a little unfair to bash all the journalists who fell victim to his prank. I doubt they took the time to fact-check all of the bizarre photos that were tweeted before that, including the strange bathroom signs and questionable-looking tap water. Why would they? Who would want to fake that? Moreover, Kimmel worked with U.S. Olympic luge star Kate Hansen to pull off his latest stunt, tweeting out the video through her account. She's a well-known athlete with a large Twitter following who's staying in the Olympic Village, and she'd been actively posting to her account throughout the events. It seemed pretty legit. Plus her wolf video instantly went viral, so even though reporters didn't have confirmation it was real, it was still newsworthy.
I think if anybody's really to blame here, it's Jimmy Kimmel. His twerking and Sochi wolf stunts exploit the difficulty of fact-checking social media, and they bring a lot of publicity to his show. It's easy to film a fake Sochi video and make journalists look dumb by juxtaposing clips of their reports on it. Especially if you ally with a famous Olympian to do your dirty work for you. If journalists can learn anything from his stunts, it's to remain skeptical when reporting on news that comes out of personal social media accounts. It can still be newsworthy and make a funny story, but it shouldn't be presented as fact. You never know when Kimmel is wearing skis behind the curtain.
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