Breitbart.com ridiculed Paul Krugman for filing for Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection in a since-deleted post whose claims originated with a satire website. Just last month, Breitbart.com castigated a news outlet for running with a story from that same website.
In the March 11 post, Breitbart.com editor at large Larry O'Connor mocked the Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist for his alleged financial mismanagement. Unfortunately for O'Connor, the report that Krugman went bankrupt is clearly a joke and originated from the satirical website The Daily Currant. O'Connor has since deleted the post without explanation. (Update: O'Connor tweeted, saying he “trusted Boston.com as the source for that Krugman piece, but they were duped by Daily Currant, therefore, so was I!”)
In his post, O'Connor jabbed Krugman for supposedly spending "$84,000 in one month" on Portuguese wines and “a dress from the Victorian period,” and concluded that “apparently this Keynsian [sic] thing doesn't really work on the micro level.” O'Connor sourced the report to a Boston.com post written by “Prudent Investor.” The post by “Prudent Investor” sources an Austrian website, which reprinted the original Daily Currant story. (Update: Boston.com appears to have deleted the story.)
Just last month, the Breitbart team laid into the Washington Post when the paper's website adopted a satirical story about Sarah Palin from Daily Currant. In a post about the snafu, Breitbart blogger John Nolte ripped the paper for not letting “facts get in the way of a good Narrative.” According to Nolte, if Post blogger Suzi Parker “had a shred of self-awareness, integrity, and dignity, she would have changed the headline to 'Too Good To Check,' and under it posted an essay about how shallow, smug, bitterly angry partisanship can blind you to common sense.”
But when his website ran with a too good to check story about Paul Krugman, they merely deleted the post without explanation.
O'Connor is scheduled to participate in the “CPAC 2013 All Star Panel” at this week's Conservative Political Action Conference.
Screenshot of the post before it was deleted:
This is (at least) the second major embarrassment for the Breitbart sites in recent weeks. Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro was recently the target of widespread criticism and ridicule after he wrote a post highlighting the Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's ties to a nefarious, non-existent group called “Friends of Hamas.”
UPDATE: Krugman has responded on his blog:
OK, I'm an evil person -- and my scheming has paid off.
On Friday I started hearing from friends about a fake story making the rounds about my allegedly filing for personal bankruptcy; I even got asked about the story by a reporter from Russian television, who was very embarrassed when I told him it was fake. But I decided not to post anything about it; instead, I wanted to wait and see which right-wing media outlets would fall for the hoax.
UPDATE X2: The Washington Post's Erik Wemple reports on how the satire claim was highlighted at Boston.com and subsequently deleted:
Brian McGrory, the [Boston] Globe's editor, explains that no editorial official at his paper ever made a decision to post the piece. “The story arrived deep within our site from a third party vendor who partners on some finance and market pages on our site,” says McGrory. It was never on the Boston.com homepage, says McGrory. “We never knew it was there till we heard about it from outside.” Since the posting went up, McGrory attests to having done “urgent work to get it the hell down,” something that appears to have happened, though not as quickly as McGrory would have liked. “The idea that we'd have a partner on our site is actually news to me,” says McGrory, who vows to “address our relationship with that vendor.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Paul Krugman won a Pulitzer Prize. He won a Nobel Prize.