Across the World in Eighty Lies
The story was charming: a brief article about soups, regularly replenished for many years, secreted in jars throughout oceans. The soups, based on one supply, have been “older than Taylor Swift.” I devoured the article, printed in December 2022 on Atlas Obscura, an internet publication billed as “best-in-class journalism about hidden locations, unimaginable historical past, scientific marvels, and gastronomical wonders,” and texted it to some soup-obsessed associates. Then I forgot about it for months till the climate turned chilly and I pulled up the hyperlink once more, solely to note the article had modified. An italicized editor’s be aware had been added to the highest, which started: “This text has been retracted because it doesn’t meet Atlas Obscura’s editorial requirements.” The be aware went on to state that a number of particulars and interviews had been fabricated.
Intrigued, I did a Google seek for the creator, Blair Mastbaum. His social media profiles and Wikipedia web page recommended an American author in his mid-forties, very lively on Instagram, the place he posted captionless photographs of his travels in Europe. Mastbaum had written ten different articles for Atlas Obscura, eight of which, it turned out, had related retractions. Matters ranged extensively: acoustic archeology, Hawaiian cultural appropriation, an obscure dialect of signal language. Mastbaum’s first retracted story had been printed in January 2022; the final another than a yr later.
His closing article, from February 2023, was in regards to the Scottish city of Moffat implementing “darkish weeks” to guard the evening sky from synthetic lighting. Besides: the townsfolk of Moffat had by no means executed such a factor; specialists and locals quoted within the story had by no means been contacted or interviewed, and not less than one doesn’t appear to really exist. It was an astonishing quantity of lies packed neatly into an 1,100-word article. Fiction masquerading as journalism is nothing new, however within the age of Google Alerts and plagiarism checkers, it looks as if it must be unimaginable to maintain a year-long collection of audacious lies. How can a author nonetheless pull off a con like this? And given the infinite alternatives for scamming anonymously, why would anybody undertake such revealing and labour-intensive deceptions?
Based in 2009, Atlas Obscura is an internet publication specializing in descriptions and tales of offbeat locations, created because the antithesis of the well-trod itineraries provided by fashionable guidebooks. It has attracted tens of millions of {dollars} in funding and expanded right into a journey planning app, a retail evaluation web site, and a food-focused vertical known as Gastro Obscura. The editorial mission is to inform true tales that appear, at first look, to be stranger than fiction, which is maybe why Mastbaum’s unusual fictions appeared so believable. His tales weren’t outlandish; they have been nicely researched and populated with factual particulars, with plausible quotes attributed to actual folks. Writing them was not less than as a lot work as reporting honestly would have been, suggesting they weren’t born of mental or skilled laziness however another, extra inscrutable, motivation.
It appears seemingly that all the pieces unravelled with the ultimate article about Moffat, which additionally bore the longest editor’s be aware—maybe Mastbaum had gotten carried away along with his decorative thrives. One of many sources who denied talking with Mastbaum, an city planner from Poland named Agata Łopuszyńska, replied to my message by which I’d requested how she had discovered in regards to the article. “That’s a loopy story,” she wrote again. Łopuszyńska discovered in regards to the article when a person from a dark-sky group within the UK emailed to ask her about it. She had by no means been to Scotland or heard of Mastbaum and was shocked to see quotes, and even images included within the article, attributed to her. Quickly after different baffled sources reached out to Atlas Obscura, Łopuszyńska was contacted by an editor, who informed her about an electronic mail alternate between himself and Łopuszyńska that Mastbaum had supplied as proof that he had interviewed her. It even included a pretend Polish telephone quantity, Łopuszyńska mentioned, which Mastbaum had informed Atlas Obscura he had used to contact her on WhatsApp. Łopuszyńska doesn’t use WhatsApp. The e-mail alternate had been fabricated. Most weird was a one-word electronic mail (“hi there”) Łopuszyńska present in her junk folder, despatched by Mastbaum two weeks after the story had been printed.
Łopuszyńska wished all the article had been faraway from Atlas Obscura’s web site, not simply appended with an editor’s be aware. “For me it could be finest to not see my title in such a rip-off,” she wrote to me. Once I spoke with Samir S. Patel, editor-in-chief of Atlas Obscura, he acknowledged that that they had unpublished a few of Mastbaum’s tales. “However that’s not correct journalistic observe,” he mentioned. When the errors within the Moffat piece got here to gentle, the web site performed an investigation and briefly unpublished tales as different points emerged. Afterward, they republished these tales, with out their pictures and with the addition of editor’s notes. “We wish there to be a document,” he defined. It was the identical method taken by the New York Occasions in 2002, when its editors found errors and fabrications in Michael Finkel’s reporting on little one slavery in West Africa, and in 2003, when the newspaper found that employees reporter Jayson Blair had fabricated particulars in not less than thirty-six tales.
For Patel, a Brooklyn-based science journalist who joined Atlas Obscura in 2017, the incident was perplexing and painful. Mastbaum’s tales didn’t elevate any crimson flags, he mentioned; particulars have been spot-checked by editors, and notes have been supplied at any time when that they had questions. They didn’t suspect something was amiss till a reader reached out to them. As soon as they realized there have been issues with the story, he defined, they did a whole evaluation of all of Mastbaum’s work, reaching out to each single supply and documenting the inconsistencies in an editor’s be aware. In response to Patel, Mastbaum ghosted them after the editors notified him of the complete evaluation. Patel nonetheless stands behind their editorial course of. “I wouldn’t say we’ve modified it,” he says. “However I’ll put it this fashion: it’s modified us slightly bit.” They’re rather less trusting than they was.
A constellation of on-line profiles suggests Mastbaum is a lapsed novelist and former copywriter who lives in Europe along with his associate, filmmaker Scott Coffey. Coffey is finest identified for writing and directing the 2005 movie Ellie Parker, starring the Australian actress Naomi Watts. When Mastbaum organized a GoFundMe for Coffey’s dental bills in the summertime of 2023, a donor named Naomi Watts contributed $2,000—a element worthy of a fabulist. On Instagram, Mastbaum documented his travels within the UK and Spain, locations that later appeared in his Atlas Obscura tales. On-line, it’s simple to glean sufficient particulars a few stranger’s life to assemble a vivid however superficial portrait of them—however unimaginable to map their mysterious inside trajectory, from writing queer coming-of-age novels to publishing fraudulent journey journalism.
Other than Atlas Obscura, his solely important journalism credit score, Mastbaum printed related tales on a now-idle Substack: quirky, detailed digressions into cultural practices and his experiences overseas. Most have been about Europe, however one caught my eye as a result of it was a few nation nearer to residence: the Kwakwaka’wakw tribes of coastal BC. The publish included a quote from Jennifer Kramer, an affiliate professor of anthropology and museum curator on the College of British Columbia. I despatched her an electronic mail to ask if she had ever spoken with this author. No, she wrote again rapidly, including, “It’s disturbing to be taught that he has falsely cited me.” Some particulars included within the publish, Kramer informed me, have been correct, whereas others have been fully mistaken. I seemed up a quote attributed to the well-known anthropologist Franz Boas and located that it got here from a e book by one other scholar, written eight years after Boas died. The general impact of the publish was just like that of a kind of AI-generated pictures of an individual with too many fingers: nearly however not fairly convincing. “Elements of the descriptions stem from accuracy however they’ve turn out to be distorted or learn fully mistaken to supply stereotypical or offensive outcomes,” Kramer replied. (I ran the Substack publish via Copyleaks, an internet software that guarantees to let you know “with distinctive accuracy” whether or not a bit of textual content has been authored by AI. It got here again as definitively human.)
Patel mentioned the evaluation of Mastbaum’s reporting by Atlas Obscura editors revealed a equally confounding mixture of reality and fiction. “Some [of his sources] acquired again to us and mentioned, ‘Sure, that is an correct reflection of the dialog that I had with this author.’ Others acquired again to us and mentioned, ‘I really feel like I mentioned this, however I don’t suppose I mentioned this on this case.’ Or ‘I’ve mentioned this, however I didn’t discuss to this author and I’ve by no means heard of this individual in my life.’” Two of Mastbaum’s earliest articles handed editorial evaluation, apparently freed from falsehoods.
Mastbaum’s tales proceed a protracted custom of journalistic fabrications, which frequently contain the distortion of some unique tradition or milieu: Finkel’s falsified reporting on little one slavery in West Africa; Stephen Glass’s fictionalized voyage into the guts of a hacker conference; Janet Cooke’s story “Jimmy’s World,” a sordid story in regards to the eponymous eight-year-old heroin addict that was briefly honoured with a Pulitzer Prize earlier than Cooke’s lies unravelled. There’s a type of dynamic voyeurism at play, interesting to stereotypes and preconceived concepts, which lends it the standard that Stephen Colbert as soon as described as “truthiness.” The reader feels as if they’re peering via a window into the actual world, unaware that the very pane of glass they’re wanting via is warped. The lies themselves are dangerous, however so too is our incapability to acknowledge them.
For Nieman Lab, professor and journalist Charlie Beckett writes, “Within the wake of all of the untrustworthy content material on-line, journalists have forgotten that it was axiomatic that ‘you shouldn’t imagine what you learn within the papers.’” Patel identified the identical factor to me. “Return 100 years . . . and other people took journalism with a grain of salt,” he mentioned. “Then there was a interval the place journalists have been actually trusted and seen as gatekeepers—the Cronkite period.” Now we’re again in a cynical section: in 2023, the Reuters Institute Digital Information Report discovered solely 37 p.c of English-speaking Canadians belief the information.
It’s not a nasty factor that we’re extra skeptical of the media, that we problem what confronts us with questions. The issue is that skepticism itself doesn’t equip us to differentiate between reality and fiction. In 2019, nearly 40 p.c of surveyed Canadians admitted in an Ipsos ballot that that they had been suckered not less than as soon as by pretend information, a proportion that maybe not coincidentally spiked with the arrival of AI instruments like Midjourney and DALL-E 3, which may produce more and more realistic-looking pictures. And after one other yr of layoffs that continued to decimate the hollowed-out media trade, it’s additionally more durable for media organizations to remain on prime of. Patel acknowledged that Atlas Obscura depends on editors to examine articles, however few retailers allocate a price range or time to devoted reality checking.
Mistrust of mainstream media is one cause why a rising variety of individuals are counting on social media, like TikTok, as a major supply of reports, although platforms are rife with misinformation: a 2022 investigation by NewsGuard discovered that one in 5 search outcomes on TikTok contained false claims. However examples of misinformation spawn indiscriminately throughout platforms, as a result of they share a basic construction: they’re designed to incentivize engagement. It’s a technological expression of the fabricator’s logic—a hierarchy of consideration over accuracy.
Mastbaum’s fabrications have been convincing for a similar cause any fakery is: burnished with charming particulars and memorable quotes, they have been nearly higher than actual. Why a middle-aged former novelist would craft such elaborate fabrications and lies about outdated broth for 50 cents a phrase is more durable to reply. Mastbaum didn’t reply to my emails or DMs on Instagram for remark, however I didn’t actually count on him to. He is aware of in addition to I do this the actual clarification may by no means be as attention-grabbing as a narrative.
Michelle Cyca is a contributing author at The Walrus. She has written for Maclean’s, the Vancouver Solar, and Chatelaine.