Opinion
12 Sep 03

The Men Behind The Berlusconi Hoax

P45rant.net has been responsible for more than one news hoax – leaving egg on the faces of some more ‘reputable’ newshounds.

At the end of July, a story appeared in the Irish Independent and other newspapers concerning a statement purported to have been made by the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Apparently, in a speech to the Society of Italian Art Curators, the controversial PM had demanded that Ireland’s National Gallery return its Caravaggio painting to its rightful home – i.e. Italy.

Only problem was – the story was a complete hoax. It had first appeared two days earlier on an internet discussion forum on the web-site P45Rant.com. With its “wasting time @ work” slogan, P45, is aimed at “wage-slaves in Ireland and further afield” and mixes humour, satire, new writing, games, a jokes database and a wideranging discussion forum.
“We set it up about four years ago,” says Paul Clerkin of Desire Publishing who operate the web-site, “and it grew from there.”
ELEMENT OF TRUTH
The Caravaggio story wasn’t the first hoax to have originated on the site. Another P45Rant story that appeared last year concerned a pair of Irish speaking Cork twins who were at a 4th July fireworks display in Springfield, Illinois and who were “arrested” by the CIA for speaking in Arabic code.
“It appeared in Unison the Irish Independent web-site and the next thing a newspaper in Springfield, Illinois was getting calls from Irish newspapers,” he explains.
For a hoax story to work, Clerkin believes that there has to be at least some element of truth about it.
“We had one a while back about plans to introduce a minimum walking speed in Grafton Street. It was actually being proposed for Oxford Street in London and we included that bit at the end of the piece. If someone had researched the last part of the story it would have checked out and the rest would have seemed plausible.”
According to Clerkin the Irish Independent has since published an apology to the Italian Government for printing a false and misleading story.
“As far as I know they have yet to apologise to their readers for misleading them, which says a lot about how they feel about these kind of things.”