Spotted at the Times of India on December 1:
I have contacted the newspaper, to no avail: the story still stands online, despite Miranda having never revealed the matter on a blog, the incident never having taken place on November 15, 2007, and that it never happened at a Victoria’s Secret show.
To say that Paris Hilton wanted to close a show is a nice stretch of the imagination considering she never attempted to do any such thing: no wonder the famous get sick of tabloid journalism (that even broadsheets engage in now). I can’t even place the world’s presently most photographed woman at the show, but Paris-watchers will be able to say for sure.
I know the Victoria’s Secret show is in the Zeitgeist at the moment and all of this is great for the telecast, but does the Times really need the extra ad revenue from this piece when it does the newspaper little credit?
In India, the item may have been misreported initially by Kiran Pahwa at Top News: there is an item from November 28 at topnews.in. There, it details the wrong venue, date and how Miranda revealed the matter to Sassybella (which in fact only posted a Pedestrian.tv video).
You would think a colleague’s tip-off would have been treated with more astuteness and immediacy: the San Francisco Chronicle knew when to take a story of?ine when it found out the facts were wrong. Yahoo! News recently had to publish a correction on another Paris Hilton story after the Associated Press got some info wrong, and the AP alerted those carrying its stories.
A correction would be a good thing to do: we all eat humble pie from time to time.
Hopefully this is the last post tracking how this item of fake news is propagated.