Fun_People Archive
20 Aug
Re: Quote of the Week

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 96 12:41:08 -0700
To: Fun_People
Subject: Re: Quote of the Week

From: Linda Branagan <linda@jerry.ls.com>

The Mariah Carey quote was fabricated, and may actually turn
into an interesting ISP privacy case, depending on how many
lawyers Sony wants to throw at Sirius.

The scoop from http://www.suck.com/vacuum/96/07/15/index.htmlf
is attached.  Cupcake is www.cupcake.com.

--L.


Last week's Filler included a "quote" by Mariah Carey [Of poor,
starving kids: "I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all
those flies and death and stuff." Arno Harris <arno@novomedia.com>
responds:

        The hot tip re: your story on Mariah Carey. This particular
        quote started as an innocuous spoof interview on Cupcake - the
        quote is completely made up. Shortly after it appeared on the
        site, British news tabloids somehow picked up the quote and
        didn't fact check well enough... sort of surprising from a tabloid.
        From there, the BBC's Radio 1 quoted the tabloid story, again
        without verifying the source. Once Radio 1 quoted it, the story
        became as good as true and has appeared in various other
        publications, including your own. Needless to say, the lawyers over
        at Sony are going ape-shit. They've been posing as cupcake
        "fans" trying to cozy up to cupcake's staff... no such luck.
        Cupcake is run by an individual and is run from the Sirius
        network. Sirius deserves the ISP Integrity award: they have
        repeatedly turned down Sony's request for the cupcake account
        owner's name.

        I'm not sure if this is a story about the power of the Web or the
        weakness of the media...your guess?

Thanks for the scoop - needless to say, we're pretty thrilled.
Filler's statement of purpose specifically includes the
propagation of false rumors and outright lies - looks like we
scored a homerun with this one.

Naturally Sony executives are flipping - our girl Mariah's
married to one of 'em. I'm sure he's more than slightly displeased
that people everywhere have the impression his wife is not so
swift. But really, it's the best thing that could've happened to
her, career-wise. They didn't really think that goody-two-shoes,
bare-midriff-at-the-amusement-park schtick was gonna play for long,
what with Alanis making a name for the bitches (or Barbies posed as
bitches, anyway)?

But, the real scoop here is that the power of the Web promulgates
the weakness of the media. We're just proud to play a small part in
the whole ugly equation.



                                                 courtesy of
                                                Polly Esther
                                                  and you

© 1996 Peter Langston