The Leader

A publication's most critical asset is its credibility. Without a trusting readership, a newspaper, magazine or broadcast will go broke.

But every year respected publications with national audiences print big, misleading, intentional lies in the spirit of an ancient holiday.

On April 1, 1996, thousands of subscribers opened the New York Times and gaped in horror at a full-page ad for Taco Bell.

They saw the stately headline: "Taco Bell Buys the Liberty Bell." Their eyes darted to the paragraph below: "In an effort to help the national debt, Taco Bell is pleased to announce that we have agreed to purchase the Liberty Bell, one of our country's most historic treasures."

Numerous Philadelphians took to their telephone in protest. Around lunchtime, Taco Bell assured consumers that the ad was an April Fools hoax.

The stunt was tremendously successful. According to Paine PR, the agency behind the prank, the Liberty Bell ad generated publicity equal to $25 million of advertising. National news outlets, like USA Today, covered the hoax and the subsequent controversy. For a few days, their sales spiked dramatically.

The roots of April Fools probably lie in ancient traditions that celebrated spring with playful mischief. Theories abound, and facts remain elusive.

The reigning story, according to Alex Boese's book, "The Museum of Hoaxes," credits the French. In the late 16th century, they purportedly harassed conservatives that refused to adopt the new Gregorian calendar. Each year, as the conservatives celebrated the year's end in late March, pranksters tagged their backs with small paper fish.

Boese describes a legendary BBC television hoax from April 1, 1957. Richard Dimbleby, a respected news anchor, reported in his nightly broadcast that Switzerland had recently amassed a record spaghetti crop. Footage showed a family picking long strands of pasta from trees. The station fielded calls from hundreds of viewers, some asking how they could grow their own spaghetti tree.

On April 1, 2002, Google.com revealed the secret to its speedy search engine: clusters of trained pigeons that rank websites based on a system developed at Stanford University.

The PigeonRank program plucks common pigeons from the street, trains them, and employs them in plush "data coops" where they scan web pages at lightning speed for relevant content. PigeonRank, Google insists, is an extremely reliable system.

Google posted this on their website: "While some unscrupulous websites have tried to boost their ranking by including images on their pages of bread crumbs, bird seed and parrots posing seductively in resplendent plumage, Google's PigeonRank technology cannot be deceived by these techniques."

Online forum Searchguild.com took an April Fools stab at Google last year, launching Undergoos.com, a search engine for underwear. A modeling option allows users to dress a Google founder in unconventional undergarments, slippers and a whip.

National Public Radio also broke from professional ethics in 2005 to stage an entire interview concerning steroid use among classical musicians. The broadcast remains on npr.org, where only the date suggests deception.

Expect media prankster Joey Skaggs to announce another April Fools parade in New York City this year. He has succeeded in luring reporters to Fifth Avenue for the phantom parade since 1986. CNN showed up with cameras in 2000 and posted an embarrassed account of the hoax to CNN.com that evening.

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