Iranian news agency, FARS cited a poll by The Onion, a satirical website , as a credible source, claiming a majority of U.S. rural whites prefer Ahmadinejad over Obama.
Later, the report was no longer available online.
Iranian news agency FARS reported the results of a Gallup poll on Friday, which it said had found that “an overwhelming majority of rural white Americans said they would rather vote for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than U.S. President Barack Obama.”
A screen grab of the Onion’s faux Gallup poll.
The poll in question, however, was not a real poll, but a fake poll published by the satirical website The Onion.
Apparently not realizing that the poll was a fake, FARS reported that “60 percent of rural whites said they at least respected that Ahmadinejad doesn’t try to hide the fact that he’s Muslim,” using the text of the Onion report verbatim.
The Onion faux report also quoted a “West Virginia resident Dale Swiderski, who, along with 77 percent of rural Caucasian voters, confirmed he would much rather go to a baseball game or have a beer with Ahmadinejad, a man who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and has had numerous political prisoners executed, than spend time with Obama.”
“He takes national defense seriously, and he’d never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does,” the satirical Onion article cited the West Virginia resident as saying.
The FARS report was later unavailable on the news agency’s website.
Israel’s embassy in the U.S. later poked fun at the Iranian news agency for citing the Onion as a credible source.
On Twitter, the embassy wrote: “Dear Iran (@khamenei_ir): @TheOnion is not a reliable source for US opinion. See Gallup.”
View original HAARETZ publication at: http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/iranian-news-agency-cites-fake-poll-saying-ahmadinejad-is-more-popular-than-obama-1.467364
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