A Long Drink of Sweet Vindication

BUDAPEST, May 10 – In yet another demonstration of the narrowing gulf between the "serious" news media and supposedly "joke" websites like this one, a story that circled the world about a group of workers who allegedly drank from a barrel of rum containing a human corpse has been revealed to be as bogus as we originally suggested it was, when we beat all these stuck-up so-called "professionals" to it in the first place last week, the friggin' putzes. The worldwide dissemination of the story, which originally appeared in online police magazine zsaru.hu, began several hours after we published a light-hearted item on the goofball piece, which prominently warned that it "seems way too good to be obviously true." Unfortunately, it was not as obvious to some others.

Within several hours of our post the local branch of newswire Reuters ran with the story, minus any suggestion that it might be bunk, which in turn led numerous other supposedly sober and exacting publications - including the ooooh-soo-serious Budapest Times - to drink it down and spit it out to their readers. Within a few days, variations on the piece with clever headlines like "Stolen rum had real body" and "Yo ho ho and a body in the rum" had appeared in newspapers and on websites around the world, even though a quick trolling of the Internet showed that some near-identical stories had previously made the rounds and been proven to be utter bullshit.

According to a prominent report about the prominent report yesterday on index.hu, Foreign Ministry spokesman Viktor Polgár said the story, which concerned a dead diplomat allegedly shipped back to Hungary from Jamaica in the barrel of rum, could not be true for at least three reasons.

First, Polgár said that if a Hungarian diplomat dies while abroad, the ministry always brings the body home and pays for the funeral. Second, twenty years ago (when the death supposedly took place) Hungary only had a consulate in Cuba, where it would have not gone unnoticed if a diplomat had disappeared. More to the point, he continued, back then it would have been more difficult to bring 300 liters of rum to Hungary than a dead body. Nevertheless, Polgár said that if the magazine provided the name of the diplomat, the ministry would be able to quickly confirm what had happened to him.

Despite this, Zsaru Editor-in-Chief Károly Cs. Csala maintained that the story is true. "I am convinced, I have no doubts that the article published in Zsaru is authentic," he said.

For their part, Reuters has retracted their story, and in an (almost) gracious nod, admitted that they should have listened to us, saying "maybe we should have known it was too good to be true." Of course it was; otherwise we wouldn't have printed it.