On Thurdsay struggling Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley’s campaign issued a bombastic “open letter” to “Wall Street Megabanks” and a policy paper outlining financial reform proposals. O’Malley’s team probably hoped this kind of bold, somewhat ridiculous move (“TO: Wall Street Megabanks“? Come on) would earn a bump of press attention for the campaign. The good news: It did. The bad news: It’s because the first footnote of the policy paper cited an off-brand, non-Onion fake news article which said that former attorney general Eric Holder had been hired by JP Morgan Chase at an annual salary of $77 million. (In point of fact, former attorney general Eric Holder has not been hired by JP Morgan at an annual salary of $77 million.)
Here’s the sentence that’s footnoted:
O’Malley campaign
Here’s the original footnote, first caught by Phil Mattingly of Bloomberg (you can read the fake article it cited here), and the quickly fixed version:
Welp! (The non-fake Times story about Holder’s actual new corporate-law gig is here.)
