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Neil Armstrong on the moon (Credit: NASA)

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Two Papers Fooled by 'Onion' Moon Spoof

Updated: Saturday, 05 Sep 2009, 1:45 PM CDT
Published : Saturday, 05 Sep 2009, 1:44 PM CDT

By MIKE BRODY

(MYFOX NATIONAL) - Two newspapers in Bangladesh ran a report from the satirical news Web site "the Onion" last week that quoted Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, as saying it was all "an elaborate hoax" perpetrated by the U.S. government, according to TechCrunch .

New Nation and the Daily Manab Zamin have apologized to readers for their gullibility. The tabloid Daily Manab Zamin printed the satire first on Wednesday and New Nation ran the story on Thursday.

"We thought it was true so we printed it without checking," Hasanuzzuman Khan, associate editor of the New Nation told the AFP news agency . "We didn't know the Onion was not a real news site."

In the fake Onion article , Armstrong had told a news conference he had been "forced to reconsider every single detail of the monumental journey after watching a few persuasive YouTube videos and reading several blog posts" by a conspiracy theorist.

This isn't the first time fake stories have fooled the press . China's state-run newspaper, the Beijing Evening News, published a fake story from the Onion in 2002 that said Congress was threatening to leave D.C. unless a new Capitol was built.


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