Breitbart.com Carries on Its Founder’s Tradition – Posts As Fact a Satirical Story Claiming Paul Krugman Declared Bankruptcy

A little over a month after the website once operated by the late racist provocateur Andrew Breitbart published a story falsely accusing then-nominee for Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel of receiving funding from a foreign group called Friends of Hamas, now Breitbart.comn has been snookered by a post from a satirical site that suggested Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman had filed for bankruptcy:

Breitbart.com ridiculed Paul Krugman for filing for Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection in a since-deleted post whose claims originated with a satire website. Just last month, Breitbart.com castigated a news outlet for running with a story from that same website.

In the March 11 post, Breitbart.com editor at large Larry O’Connor mocked the Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist for his alleged financial mismanagement. Unfortunately for O’Connor, the report that Krugman went bankrupt is clearly a joke and originated from the satirical website The Daily Currant. O’Connor has since deleted the post without explanation. (Update: O’Connor tweeted, saying he “trusted Boston.com as the source for that Krugman piece, but they were duped by Daily Currant, therefore, so was I!”)

In his post, O’Connor jabbed Krugman for supposedly spending “$84,000 in one month” on Portuguese wines and “a dress from the Victorian period,” and concluded that “apparently this Keynsian [sic] thing doesn’t really work on the micro level.” O’Connor sourced the report to a Boston.com post written by “Prudent Investor.” The post by “Prudent Investor” sources an Austrian website, which reprinted the original Daily Currant story. (Update: Boston.com appears to have deleted the story.)

Just last month, the Breitbart team laid into the Washington Post when the paper’s website adopted a satirical story about Sarah Palin from Daily Currant. In a post about the snafu, Breitbart blogger John Nolte ripped the paper for not letting “facts get in the way of a good Narrative.” According to Nolte, if Post blogger Suzi Parker “had a shred of self-awareness, integrity, and dignity, she would have changed the headline to ‘Too Good To Check,’ and under it posted an essay about how shallow, smug, bitterly angry partisanship can blind you to common sense.”

But when his website ran with a too good to check story about Paul Krugman, they merely deleted the post without explanation.

At least Breitbart.com acknowledged this error, even if only in a Tweet. The erroneous article about Hagel’s ties to the fictitious Friends of Hamas is still on its site without any erratum or other indication that the story is a lie.