If you watched the prelims to the Ivory Coast/Colombia match at the World Cup, you would have seen Ivory Coast team member Serey Die bawling his merry eyes out. You may well have caught later that it was because his father had apparently died a couple of hours before the kick-off, because that particular piece of news was relayed to the world in all the languages you care to consider and in a hundred thousand reports.
1) Nope, his father hadn’t just died2) He was crying due to the emotion of the occasion, nothing else3) The whole thing was started by a single Brazilian match commentator who thought up the story on the spur of the moment4) The whole world’s press and media just decided to run the “news” without bothering to check sources, veracity or anything approaching decent reporting standards.
Hey guys, don’t let facts get in the way of a good story now, will you? The World Cup Brazil 2014, from the same people that brought you ‘Iraq has WMD’.