Iran's state media has fallen for a made-up poll from a satirical US website claiming that a majority of rural white Americans would vote for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over Barack Obama.

Fars News Agency, a semi-official mouth piece of the Iranian regime, earnestly published a word-for-word duplicate of an article from the Onion, a spoof news organisation based in Chicago.

The satirical article cited a fake Gallup poll which found that 77 per cent of white, rural voters would rather go to a baseball game or have a beer with Mr Ahmadinejad than with the US president.

It went on to cite a made-up West Virginian named Dale Swiderski, who said that he preferred the Iranian to Mr Obama because: "He takes national defense seriously, and he'd never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does."

Fars, which loyally prints the anti-Western and anti-Israeli tirades of senior Iranian officials, copied the entire Onion article without giving any indication of its source.

It printed the short bulletin in English but did not appear to have translated it into Farsi.



Will Tracy, the editor of the Onion, released a statement joking that Fars was a subsidiary of the Onion. "They have acted as our Middle Eastern bureau since the mid 1980s, when the Onion’s publisher, T. Herman Zweibel, founded Fars with the government approval of the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. The Onion freely shares content with Fars and commends the journalists at Iran’s Finest News Source on their superb reportage."

Many news organisations have fallen victim to the Onion's mock-serious news style. In 2004, a Beijing paper reported on an Onion piece which claimed that members of Congress were threatening to move out of Washington unless their lavatories were upgraded.----

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/9574727/Iran-fooled-by-US-satirical-website-The-Onion.html