Air Force One and Citizen Journalism Gone Awry

“You can’t make this stuff up,” a headline recently read on the Flight Aware site in the UK.

Wrong. You can make it up, as evidenced by a story about a so-called mishap aboard Air Force One.

The Flight Aware site was referring to an “article” written by Steve Miller, a one-time Las Vegas city councilman, former flight school instructor and current ezine writer of all things Vegas. Miller is also a longtime columnist for author Rick Porello’s AmericanMafia.com.

Regular readers of Miller’s ezines, titled “Inside Vegas,” know that he occasionally enjoys lightening things up a bit. Not everybody, however, knew that about Miller the day after President Obama landed while aboard Air Force One at McCarran International Airport. On that October day, Miller’s ezine headline blared:

50-pound slab of blue ice falls off Air Force One, narrowly missing Occupy Las Vegas protesters

Miller was able to get his satirical post onto the Las Vegas Sun’s website by posting his blurb in a comment below a news article about the President’s visit.

And the Canada Free Press, which periodically picks up pieces from Miller’s ezine’s, included the blue ice story on the front page of its site. That’s when blogs and forums picked it up, complete with a Las Vegas dateline as if it were an AP wire story.

The thing is, it wasn’t a real story at all, and it wasn’t based on any facts. Miller had conjured it up. It was about as believable as scenes from the comedy film Airplane! Still, sites ran with it.

When Miller saw his story flying across the Internet, mostly posted by fringe media, he didn’t follow up his post with another ezine. And when he was contacted by the media about the so-called story, no one, he said, asked if the story was true, so he didn’t offer up that it wasn’t.

Had those who ran it checked further, they would have learned that the runway on which Air Force One had landed wasn’t the one cited in Miller’s missive. In addition, Air Force one did not fly over the Occupy Las Vegas group, as Miller also stated in his story.

Here’s how it ran, sourcing it from the Canada Free Press:

LAS VEGAS – A group of several dozen ‘Occupy Las Vegas’ protesters camping on Clark County land located under the final approach to Runway 19 at McCarran International Airport today narrowly missed being injured when a 50 lb. slab of ‘blue ice’reportedly landed within feet of their tents.

Blue ice is the frozen material formed by leaks in commercial aircraft lavatory waste tanks, a mixture of human waste and vivid blue liquid disinfectant that freezes at high altitude. The ice generally dissipates long before the aircraft lands, but there have been documented cases of blue ice clinging to aircraft surfaces until the aircraft reaches warmer air on approach to landing, then the ice may separate from the aircraft and fall to earth. According to witnesses, the slab fell to earth seconds after Air Force One passed overhead while landing.

Clark County Director of Aviation Randall Walker was immediately notified and dispatched airport personnel to the campsite, but witnesses report that the blue ice had melted by the time officials arrived leaving only a smelly brown residue.

Walker told INSIDE VEGAS that he is personally investigating the incident, and will communicate his findings to the President’s staff.

Miller recently ‘fessed up and said he never spoke with Randall Walker and that there were no “witnesses” on the ground, as he’d originally claimed. It was satire, plain and simple. All in fun. But unlike The Onion, which on its satirical newspaper site makes it known that it’s all a parody of actual news, Miller’s ezine did not make that known.

Source: Forbes.com