I studied Russian and at one time (back in the Stone Ages) thought about a career with the NSA. Patrick Popehat: No links that I know of. How do you do it? Do either of you have links to North Korea? The way you copy North Korea's over-the-top style and broken English is pretty dead-on. Patrick Popehat: Through other parodies? We shouldn't say. What other instances of you tricking the news media have there been? Patrick decided to Go Big and post something about kung fu training. When he came back, I posted my usual "KJU deploys field guidance." thing. We let the account go dark while Kim Jong Un was "missing" back in August. There's probably more.īuzzfeed fell for it twice? How did that happen?ĭerrick Popehat: As for how Buzzfeed fell for it, twice? They're Buzzfeed. In the past week, when North Korea entered the news in a big way, Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, Slate, The Washington Post, Reuters Australia and, of course, Newsweek have paid us homage.ĭerrick Popehat: Besides Newsweek: Huffington Post, Verge, Buzzfeed News (twice), Computer World (though they were reporting on it as a parody). Patrick Popehat: Off the top of my head, The Wall Street Journal, Buzzfeed, Forbes, Norwegian TV, Verge, Roll Call and a number of smaller outlets.
How many other news outlets have fallen for your DPRK account? Can we just say we're mysterious group and our number are "unknown"? Officially Popehat has.five writers? Past alumni are welcome to blog whenever they choose.ĭerrick Popehat: Nine? Six? I lost track.
At present, we have four active bloggers. There were a couple posts on Popehat itself, and our posts on Facebook regarding such are pretty easy to find. There are people who knew that it was a parody we haven't exactly hidden that fact. He started it up again at the end of 2013 for a week, I wanted to keep it going so he gave me the keys. The Internet term "Poe's Law" comes to mind.ĭerrick Popehat: Patrick started DPRK in 2009 and stopped after a month or so because Norwegian news reported on one of his posts (NK declaring war on Cyprus). Both Derrick and I find the abusive, belligerent, self-congratulatory rhetoric of Stalinist communists amusing, because it's so "over the top" that it seems like a parody, even when it's real. We began the account simply for amusement, not as an effort to "troll" the media. (At the time Cyprus had briefly detained a North Korean ship smuggling cigarettes.) There have been others through the years. Its first coup was taking in a Norwegian television network (we think) with an imaginary threat by North Korea to rain missiles on Cyprus. Is the DPRK account the only parody account you run? Are there others? Is it common knowledge that this account is a Popehat thing? You can say I'm a "data analyst" when I'm not "Popehatting." I say it's because I'm too busy, but really I'm secretly cowed by the other writers. I'm TECHNICALLY a blogger at Popehat, but I only really write during a presidential election season. Ken is the only one of us who blogs under his actual name.ĭerrick Popehat: I feel that we can't mention Popehat without mentioning Ken, whose prolific and hilarious writing is the beating heart of the blog. The most prolific, and best, blogger at Popehat, the founder of our site, is Ken White, a criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles. We met through the forum of a defunct gaming site that, for some reason, drew an older crowd of professionals who also play computer games. Derrick is not an attorney but works in an allied profession. The Popehat blog was begun in 2005, aborted because we have lives, and restarted in or around October 2007.
You're bloggers at Popehat, correct? What do you do when you're not Popehatting? Here's what they had to say in response to emailed questions. The bloggers declined to give their real names but go by Patrick Popehat and Derrick Popehat. Turns out the account's authors are bloggers for, a libertarian law blog founded by Ken White, a former federal prosecutor. So we reached out to the men behind the mask. That's a pretty good track record for a parody account. The Washington Post, Reuters, The Huffington Post, Verge, Buzzfeed News and others have all cited tweets by as official statements by the government of North Korea. To be fair, Newsweek was not the only outlet to have fallen for the parody account.
0 kommentar(er)
