National Report
| Type | Fake news |
|---|---|
| Format | Website |
| Founder(s) | Jestin Coler |
| Publisher | Jestin Coler AKA Allen Montgomery |
| Editor-in-chief | Nigel Covington |
| Launched | 2013 |
| Website | nationalreport.net |
National Report is a fake news website which posts fictional articles related to world events. It is described by Snopes.com as a fake news site, by FactCheck.org as a satirical site and by Caitlin Dewey of the Washington Post as part of a fake-news industry, making profits from "duping gullible Internet users with deceptively newsy headlines." The National Report describes itself as a "news and political satire web publication" and provides a disclaimer that "all news articles contained within National Report are fiction". The disclaimer, however, is not printed on the main page, which instead claims that the website is "America's #1 Independent News Source."
Stories from the National Report have been taken seriously by third parties such as Fox News Channel, and the site drew criticism in October 2014 for running a series of fake stories about Ebola outbreaks in the United States, including the false report that the town of Purdon, Texas, has been quarantined after an outbreak. The story led to a traffic spike of two million unique visitors, and although the story was debunked by other websites, the original National Report story received six times as many "shares" on social media sites as the debunking stories did.
In February 2013, National Report was registered as a site.Paul Horner was the publication's lead writer; his employment began shortly after National Report went online. He said that he left National Report in 2014.Jestin Coler has written for the site under the pseudonym "Allen Montgomery".
In 2014, a Facebook interface experiment included the site on a list of those whose stories were flagged as "satire" when appearing on the social network. Writing at the time, Craig Silverman of emergent.info saw National Report as one of several websites which were "not driven by trying to do comedy or satire, but by what kind of fake stuff can we spin up to get shares that earn us money", with particularly widely spread hoax stories capable of earning thousands of dollars per day from on-site advertising.
The National Report carries a disclaimer identifying its content as satire and fake news, but there was no prominent link to this page until late December 2014. Numerous articles referring to National Report stories stated that National Report's disclaimer had been removed.
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