I'm The Mayor Of Baltimore

Iain Dale's Diary

Alex Hilton has finally got a hoax right. A couple of years ago he tried to convince the world that Margaret Thatcher had died. Yesterday he launched a website pretending to be the Mayor of Baltimore, who was "outraged", I say "outraged" by Chris Grayling's comments likening some British city centres to the Baltimore based series The Wire. Despite there being plenty of clues on the website (copyright R Monkee, British spelling etc) some pretty big media institutions fell for it hook, line and sinker.

Check THIS out from The Guardian. Even the Baltimore Sun fell for it. And so, unbelievably did the BBC.

Pretty hilarious stuff, I'm pretty shocked that the BBC and the Guardian would just copy and paste this and assume it's real, they obviously didn't call the real Mayor of Baltimore to check. The funniest part though is the comments that Alex Hilton left embedded in the HTML Source of the site:

OK, so I'm just having a bit of fun at Chris Grayling's expense.
Sitting in the office on a hot August afternoon, I was fantasising
that I was Mayor of Baltimore and how annoyed I would be.
I hope you very quickly picked up that this was a spoof.
Didn't mean to break any laws or ethical mores - please don't
extradite me if I have unwittingly done so. Hope you appreciate the
humour, Alex Hilton, alexhilton@gmail.com - 07985 384 859

(Via Plato Says)