Happy New Year, everyone. To get 2010 off to a healthy start, I thought a good chuckle was in order. I trust you’ll love this story as much as I do…
TMZ, a gossip site and TV program that mostly focuses on celebrities, breathlessly reported on Monday that it had a photo showing the late President John F. Kennedy with several nude women on a yacht in the Med in the 1950s. “The JFK Photo That Could Have Changed History,” the headline promised, with the story going on to state, “Had the photo surfaced when John F. Kennedy ran for President in 1960, it could have torpedoed his run, and changed world history.”
Now, gossip sites aren’t exactly known for their fact-checking skills. Too bad the TMZ staff decided to herald the image as being “never-before published”… because not only had it appeared in print decades earlier, it didn’t even feature JFK.
Interesting enough, TMZ reported that it approached several photo experts and two JFK biographers to inspect the image, all of whom, the site claims, believed the photo to truly depict the President. But hours after it uploaded the story, TMZ was forced to post a correction. Its staff learned via e-mail that not only was JFK not in the photo, but that the image was from a photo shoot commissioned by Playboy more than a decade after JFK’s assassination.
That photo shoot, by the way, took place in the Caribbean, with professional models lounging about the decks of a yacht and jumping off for a swim. The photo accompanied an article with one heckuva headline: “Playboy’s Charter Yacht Party: How to Have a Ball on the Briny with an Able-Bodies Complement of Ship’s Belles.”
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