I have a piece on Slate today about the Masal Bugduv hoax and its implications for…well, my sanity, but also soccer journalism and the transfer market. Some of the themes will be familiar to those of you who’ve followed the story here, but there are still some excellent reasons to click over. This is your chance—maybe your only chance—to:
* Learn Fredorrarci’s real name!
* Inhale the 1000-word narrative of the man who claims to be the hoaxer!
* Augment Slate’s puny readership with your endless, gleaming hordes!
Read the piece here. Let’s make things happen.
Read More: Masal Bugduv
by Brian Phillips · January 23, 2009
Great article, Brian, but what a surprise to see you featured on Slate!
Hey, it’s all just websites.
My jaw dropped a mile and a half when I saw who wrote that article! Slate’s an eyecatching paper (er, e-paper?). Nice work!
Nice work, Brian. Your parents must be very proud of you.
First time here, due to the Slate article, so its worth that at least. Some questions, posed generally:
Any thoughts on the choice of Arsenal as the prime suitor of Bugdov? (Besides Wenger’s noted youth policy.)
Related, any thoughts on the lack of any traction for the hoax on Arsenal-specific blogs? It seems to have tricked-up to traditional media as you said, from the likes of goal.com and caughtoffside, but never “trickled-over” (to Arseblog, Gunnerblog, Eastlower, etc.).
Paul — I’m guessing Wenger’s youth policy was the main reason the hoaxer picked Arsenal—he knew no one would blink at a connection between them and an obscure Moldovan 16-year-old. But the hoaxer also seems to be an Arsenal fan—the GalwayGooner username—and, according to what he told me, a season ticket holder, so that probably played a role as well.
I don’t know why the story never gained steam on the Arsenal blogs. I’d guess they would have been harder for GalwayGooner to target than more generalist sites, since the bloggers and commenters would have been more up to speed on club news. He might have steered clear of them for that reason, or else they just didn’t take the bait.
Brian,
Thanks for your reply. Not to attempt to monopolize you and turn this into a discussion, but I agree that Arsenal seems the practical choice based on arousing the least suspicion. Wenger signs unheard of player is hardly a headline at this point.
I wonder though, if the other blogs not picking up on it is indicative of the point (as I interpret it) of the hoax: rather than it being about the hierarchy of information flow, as I believe you posit in “…the Wild White Yonder of Truth”.
Perhaps, its about the pandering of mainstream media in an attempt to retain relevance. Their fear of obsolescence has driven them to embrace the sensationalist style of a caughtoffside, rather than an analytical approach of a blog like this one. Not necessarily a new media beats old media story, but maybe a smart media beats dumb media story.
Definitely smart media beats dumb media. But it’s telling that the hierarchically low sites that the hoaxer avoided were precisely the ones where local expertise might actually have exposed the hoax before it could take off. If one of the reasons higher-level sources wind up trusting lower-level sources more than they should is that lower-level sources tend to be repositories of specialized knowledge, then it makes sense that the hoaxer would need to mimic that dynamic—i.e., create a fake impression of belonging to that kind of repository—without risking exposure to the real thing.
Not sure if that makes sense, but in essence I think the smart-vs.-dumb and hierarchy explanations are working in concert here.
And yeah, I’m not sure if it’s fear of obsolescence that’s led to the propagation of the inane-50-best-list feature or if it’s just the hunger of the market (in any case I’d guess it’s something the Times learned from the tabloids rather than from the internet), but it’s definitely no coincidence that this was the kind of piece that fell prey to a hoax like this. There’s a quality of phony contextual hyper-awareness that makes it incredibly vulnerable: pretending you know everything about youth football in Moldova when in fact you don’t even know whether the website on your computer screen is lying to you.
There is something else about this whole affair which I don’t think anyone has picked up on (either because I neglected to highlight it originally or because it’s blindingly obvious and un-noteworthy to everyone but me) and that’s the role of Wikipedia in all this.
My chronology may be wrong here, but I think the first appearance of our Massi was in the original Wikipedia edit on July 19th. This remained (albeit with a “citation needed” tag added in the meantime) right up until a couple of days after the Times list, a few hours before I caught wind of the story.
One can easily imagine that a journalist on a deadline would have felt they could rely on a quick Wiki check to confirm the existence of this obscure player, and that if there had been no mention of Bugduv there, it would have raised enough of a suspicion to prompt the journalist to investigate.
Yeah, that’s an excellent point, and one I should have made in the Slate piece. Wikipedia’s role is actually the craziest part of this, because even though it’s so easy to manipulate it’s the one-stop fact-checking resource for everyone who uses the internet.
The Times always did like a good hoax ,remember the Hitler diaries?