NEW YORK – Fox News has been widely credited for staging ‘the greatest April Fool’s prank of the year’ by masking as a legitimate news organisation for an entire 24-hour news cycle.
Praised for taking practical jokes to a whole new level, April 1st 2011 will surely be remembered as the one day Fox News could be taken seriously.
Fox & Friends presenter Steve Doocy said it was an amazing achievement by the nation’s leading news provider to convince viewers they were watching a scrupulous journalistic enterprise.
Fair and Balanced
In just one example of hilarity, video footage was repeatedly played in full context, allowing viewers to decide the merits of the story for themselves.
Many only noticed something was amiss after hours went by without any reference to ‘Obamacare’, Nazi Germany, or the latest insidious plot on behalf of Islamic radical extremists to impose Sharia law over an unsuspecting American population.
The network even went as far as admitting the president was ‘not a Muslim’ and ‘born in America’.
Doocy admitted it was hard to get through a segment without making it seem like he had the collective balls of the Republican Party permanently attached to his chin, but maintained it was worth the effort to pull off “truly one of the greatest April Fool’s pranks of the year…maybe ever.”
‘I thought I was watching C-Span’
The toll was visible as the day wore on, with Sean Hannity visibly perspiring with the effort required to appear as an unbiased journalist simply reporting the facts of the day’s stories.
The stunt was not without a cost however – Nielsen Media Research reported ratings dipped by up to 20% as viewers lost patience and looked to other sources for their make believe news.
The network also expressed regret over the need to cancel Glenn Beck’s show for the day, as “even five minutes of Glenn would’ve given the entire game up.”
‘We’ll struggle to top this one’
“It was hard work, but it was worth it. We totally fooled everyone,” said Megan Kelly who described the hoax as a genius idea “no-one would have expected from us in a million years.”
Though confident it was worth the effort “to go against our normal instincts,” she assured regular viewers they would be going back to their usual format of playing the nation’s Conservative mouthpiece and “horribly mangling any facts foolish enough to get in the way of our fear based right-wing narrative.”
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