It almost fooled me as well, if I didn’t go looking for the All-Star logo, I wouldn’t have notice the sourcing of the story was from abcnews.com.co which is a satire site pretending to be ABC News.
The fake site had this to say about the NBA All-Star game in Charlotte.
“With this new law in place, Charlotte currently does not have any anti-discrimination protection in place, something that would be vital for a large event such as the All-Star Game,” Silver told reporters. “We are giving the state of North Carolina 30 days to repeal this law or they can expect the 2017 All-Star game to be held elsewhere. I want to make it clear that the NBA will not stand for this type of intolerance and hate.”
The fake quote from Adam Silver was picked up by Cleveland.com which attributed it to the AP.
But, it is 100% not true.
RT @NBAPR No truth to the fake abcnews account/report concerning the 2017 NBA All-Star Game. The NBA has made no new statements re: 2017 ASG
— NBA (@NBA) April 10, 2016
Cleveland.com wrote an lengthy apology apologizing to AP.
Over the weekend, someone created a site that carefully mimicked the ABC news website and included a fake story about the NBA threatening to pull next year’s All Star Game out of Charlotte in protest of North Carolina’s new law. At cleveland.com, we saw that story, believed it to be real and decided to post the news on our website.
That was our first mistake. This kind of news rarely is reported by a single national news organization. We should have found other sources, and, finding none, questioned how ABC would be alone in reporting this story. If we had done the basics, we would have figured out pretty quickly that we were seeing an impostor ABC website.
Our second mistake was in how we reported the fake news. We combined it with an Associated Press story about the North Carolina controversy but left the AP byline on what we published. That made it appear that the Associated Press had been duped by the impostor website. That’s not fair to the Associated Press, a valued partner for cleveland.com.
We apologize to AP as well, since we reported they were the ones duped because of the Cleveland.com and other sites credited them as the source.
Lesson learned is to always double check the sources, especially online ones.