THE WORLD’S FOREMOST FAKE NEWS EXPERT

In 2011, the ABC’s Jonathan Green received an email from someone going by the unlikely name of Alene Composta.

Fake news authority Jonathan Green

In 2011, the ABC’s Jonathan Green received an email from someone going by the unlikely name of Alene Composta.

“Dear Jonathan,” the email began, “would you be interested in a formal version of this post?”

At the time, Green was editor of ABC’s online opinion site The Drum. The Composta email went on to outline her plan to derail the 2011 NSW election, with Green’s and the ABC’s assistance:

It seems to be that if we can link the Liberals to this crotch talk then there is still a chance we can nudge the election toward Labor, or at least do something to limit what looks like it will be catastrophic damage inflicted by voters.

If you prefer to give this assignment to one of your regulars (Kellie Tranter, for example, who writes much better and faster than me, I admit), I would not object.

The important thing is that we do everything we can, use every tool we know, to help Kristina out of the jam some silly moves and a lot of Murdoch venom has put her in.

Green went for it. He published Composta's absurd piece, alleging foul conservative slurs against then-Labor premier Kristina Keneally. It quickly emerged, however, that the piece was fake news. Composta was fake. The slurs were fake. Everything about it was fake.

Green later blamed his decision to publish, at least in part, on the “urgency of a busy working day”:

Her name certainly seems ridiculous in hindsight, but that's hindsight, not the urgency of a busy working day … We were had. It seemed plausible. 

So the ABC ran a falsified yet convincing (to Green) item written by a fake author, making fake allegations, driven by an apparent political motive and published because of insufficient attention to detail. So where did Jonathan Green spend Sunday afternoon?

Why, in a Neapoli Wine Bar conversation with fellow leftist Ben Eltham, of course, where the pair discussed fake news:

The emergence of falsified yet convincing news seems inevitable in a fast-paced social media environment, where attention spans and attention to detail are challenged at every moment. While propaganda is as old as politics, the legitimacy of news stories is now being called into question …

Tell us all about it, Jonathan.

UPDATE. The behoovening! A Green fan attended Sunday’s must-see event:

I've heard the word 'behoove' twice in 2017. Both today at #SundaySalons. Can't half tell @GreenJ & @beneltham are journalists/writers.

— Kim (@KimAroundTown) June 4, 2017

The seven-letter plural Kim is looking for starts with ‘w’ and ends with ‘s’, but it sure isn’t ‘writers’.