As Jimmy Fallon continued his remarkable first week on “The Tonight Show” (with a sketch that featured Will Ferrell and Michelle Obama, for one thing), his late night rival and fellow Jimmy, Jimmy Kimmel, was revealing his latest prank.
A viral video of a wolf seeming to prowl the halls of the Olympic athlete’s village in Sochi tweeted by Kate Hansen of the U.S. luge team was revealed as another sly Kimmel concoction (that involved a trained wolf and the reconstruction of a dorm hallway in the Los Angeles studio).
Once more, the real effect of the video wasn’t just that it fooled people, but that it was so avidly picked up by news organizations, big and small, as being real, just because it was viral on the internet.
More than an indictment of conditions in Sochi, it was a continuing critique on the flimsy or nonexistent reporting of TV journalism who in some cases can be seen just making up details (no word from Sochi officials, and such) to make it look as if they’d reported this fraud rather than passing it along.