Oprah Winfrey’s death. A hoax.
Oprah Winfrey is not dead. Once again, and just as likely as with the Miley Cyrus death hoax, some ignorant asshat with the mentality of a 12 year old, has perpetrated a false death rumour in order to jump up and down because they “fooled the internet” into believing it’s true.
The story is all over the internet because immature people have figured out how gullible all you who scour the pages of Digg are. Here’s the scoop, not necessarily in chronological order.
- A blog was created over at http://oprahsdeath.wordpress.com/2008/09/20/oprah-winfreys-death/
- The story was added to Digg
- The story (as of the time of the writing of this post) received 962 Diggs
- Gullible suckers Naive people posted over at Yahoo Answers
- The perpetrators of the hoax repeatedly post at Digg and Yahoo and anywhere else people are questioning the truth of the story, repeating the same false claims and regurgitating the made up story as if it were fact, despite the common sense knowledge that if she was dead by more than twelve hours (since this story originated early Saturday and it’s now Sunday) it would certainly be on the legitimate mainstream news reports. It is not, despite their silly posts claiming they “just saw it on the news.”
- The perpetrators (and perhaps the occasional duped poor sod) point to a still photo of the Headline News show, to suggest that it’s true. Why a still photo? Why not the actual video? Was the headline photoshopped in?
- Another image is being linked to… but if you pause a second and consider “was it photoshopped” you might question it too.
Another blog to “prove” her death is being linked to. The blog, at http://oprahsdeath.blogspot.com/ is reporting a story found written allegedly by Cole Weezle New York Times. The story reads as follows:
New York Times Story
Oprah Winfrey, age 54, was found dead in her home residing in Chicago, Illinois at 8:21 AM on September 20, 2008. She appeared to have a bloody area around her eye, a bullet wound in her stomach and some cuts and bruises up and down her body. They suspect she was beaten in the middle of the night, and shot in the side with a silenced handgun. According to the FBI, she was killed anywhere around 1:00-2:00 A.M. this morning.
“I didn’t hear a thing, I was up until 4 last night just watching T.V. and reading some books, nothing suspicious was heard or seen, I even went outside for some ‘cigs’ a couple of times and saw nothing” -Markus Julane, Oprah’s close neighbor.
“Who did it?” A popular question that’s been being asked ever since the situation. Well, the FBI has no idea whatsoever of who could of done it from the horrible lack of evidence and witnesses. They are currently ongoing through a house scanning process on which they will figure out more about the assassin, which will hopefully uncover footprints, handprints, or any other prints of who could of done such a horrible crime.
May Oprah Winfrey Rest in Peace.
January 29, 1954 – September 20, 2008
-Reported by Cole Weezle New York Times
First. Cole Weezle does not write for the New York Times. Cole Weezle is a 16 year old kid with a MySpace. Google his name and find him for yourself.
It’s a pathetic cry for attention from pathetic people who can’t get any notoriety any other way.
Don’t believe it. Please write your own post and link here; let’s help counter the stupidity.
I know they think they’re funny, but honestly… these people who do this are worse than toe-jam. While they’re getting an inflated fill-in-the-blank because they “fooled the internet” they don’t seem to care about the damage they do to the families of the people they choose to create the hoax about. Now, I don’t particularly like Oprah… but this is just not the thing to do.
Anyone can photoshop a story to look like it came off the real site. I did it with TMZ and a silly story involving Miss Piggy and a “wardrobe malfunction” so if I can do it, so can anyone else.
Don’t be a dumbass and believe it. It’s not true.
Pass it on. And please… click the little button below and go buzz this story up. Help counteract the fraccing 900+ Diggs of the phony story.
“could of”…. the article says “could of…” lol lol lol
“who could of done it…. lol lol lol
How to spot a hoax Tip #1 – improper use of the English language.
Dude. The phrase is “could have” — not “could of”
You know, past tense and all that good stuff.
Yes, yes, I know you *hear* people say could of.
What you’re really hearing is a contraction. Could’ve
You know contractions? Not like the ones your Mommy had when she pushed your dumb arse out. The kind where you take two words, remove some letters and combine them with an apostrophe.
Like they’re instead of they are
Like we’re instead of we are
If you want to fool the Internetz, you really should learn to spell first. See? *wink*
LOL Linda. The lameness of the story also twigged my suspicions. It’s so easy to tell when they’re written by young ‘uns.
Now just think about how if they put all that energy into something productive instead of the internet equivalent of “look ma, no hands” or “look at me, look at ME, I’ve got sixteen marbles up my nose”…
A total hoax, just like Miley Cyrus death rumor..
Crazy people do crazy things..
We do not forgive, we do not forget.
[...] thanx for the clarification from fraccers. Let me post his/her arguments [...]
Thanks for your visit and let me know about copying ur post. I’m a newbie in blogging
Nice ‘meeting’ u as well
talking idiot – *sigh* isn’t it sad that people use their creativity and abilities to do such stupid things instead of using it in a productive way that might benefit themselves and others?
anonymous – Perhaps you don’t read the news to know that even people behind proxy servers aren’t really anonymous… and perhaps you don’t realize that you’re not really anonymous the the person who owns the blog either, so yeah… keep using anonymouse, or even anonymoose as your handle. That aside… why don’t you start a blog about whatever it is that Oprah did to you that you do not forgive and do not forget? I’m sure it would get a lot of hits… and at least those would be honest hits.
shierly – Oh, you’re very welcome. Be careful when posting other peoples’ stuff because some people get really upset. Quoting a paragraph or so and adding a link is always flattering to the writer, and won’t cause trouble but whole posts will get some people really upset. I wasn’t upset because you meant well…
And if you start to see trackbacks to your own blog and your posts are copied at a site, and you see advertising links or it’s a blog that has nothing but posts copied from other sites, then you know you’ve been scraped too. It happens to everyone eventually. If it happens and you want to know what to do about it, come back and I’ll find you some links to places with instructions for what to do about it.
Err… shall I address u by ms. or mr. ???
I am really a newbie in blogging, my friend thought me about this blogging things less than a month ago
what is trackback? can a blog have advertising? I thought only website can have advertising…
It seems that you are quite familiar about this blogging things, perhaps I could learn it more from you then… will u??
I’ve bookmarked your blog to my favourite now, so I could read continuously your posting
That’s very sweet shierly!
I’m a she. Over 40, mom of three (almost grown up) kids living in Saskatchewan, Canada.
A trackback is when you see on your comments list, soomething that looks like a comment but when you click it, it takes you to another website where the person has made a link to your post or your page. Wordpress shows you those so you can go see if it’s someone who enjoyed what you wrote and linked to you (like what you did with me) or if it’s someone who stole your work. There are people out there who run blogs to make money off the advertising they put on it but they don’t want to write content, so they steal it from others, sometimes with software that lets them take large amounts of others’ work via feedreaders and such.
It eventually happens to everyone. Sometimes they just take everything off of a certain tag, like one time there was a scammer who was taking any posts that were tagged with the word ‘woman” in wordpress.
About advertising:
On Wordpress.com, you are not allowed to have ads, or make money off your blog but you are allowed to have a paypal button asking for donations, and you are allowed to link to any other blog you have where you do make money, so long as the main point of your wordpress.com blog is writing stuff that you are not making money off of.
I have a wordpress.com blog. That’s the one at http://fracas.wordpress.com
I make no money there.
Blogger allows you to do whatever you want. It’s good in one way, but bad in another. Many blogger blogs are full of crap, and some blog scrapers who steal use blogger because it’s free pretty unregulated so no one stops them.
I have a blogger blog too. It’s at http://justfracas.blogspot.com
I had abandoned it but revived it recently so I can use some ads and paid posts there. (Places like Payperpost or PayU2blog)
The last option, is to pay for your own domain name and hosting with a webhost, download the wordpress software from wordpress.org and be able to have the convenience of the wordpress platform and dashboard and features, only be your own boss and do whatever you want at your blog. There isn’t the same support if you have problems like there is at wordpress.com, but if you know what you’re doing and can handle some basic things on your own, it’s a good option.
This blog is run that way. I bought the name, downloaded from wordpress.org and am building it up to eventually offer several business ideas that will allow me to keep working from home.
I hope that helps. If you have more questions, just ask! Linda (notice her comments here) is a very smart lady… she does this kind of stuff for a living and is a whiz at knowing everything and answering questions too, so if I can’t answer something I bet she can!
And thanks again for thinking such nice things!