You Can Fool Some 
People All the Time      

   Eight years before Christopher Blair was born, yours truly, a small-town sports editor, slipped an April Fools article into our daily paper.

   The story: Town fathers secretly planned to build a baseball stadium in hopes of attracting a major league team. We blogged about this in detail some time ago, if you happened to see it. 

   My readers knew all the streets by name. They should have known our imaginary stadium footprint would obliterate downtown. 

   Surely they knew that politicians can't tax churches to raise funds. Most of them should have recognized that my "sketch" of the proposed stadium was really a real photo of old Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. 

   All else failing, they might have noticed my last line, The stadium is expected to be finished by next APRIL FOOLS DAY.

   This sports editor was perhaps the most fooled of all. It never occurred to me that anyone would miss my obvious curve balls. Even Mom believed it. That was April 1, 1964.  

   Journalism professors never told us that some readers believe whatever we write - truth, falsehood or satire.

   So, who is Christopher Blair? Just for fun he takes the art of fake news to a new level - daily on Facebook - reaching millions of biased readers who get suckered and keep coming back for more.

   Lincoln was right: You can fool some people all the time. We'll pick up Blair's story next week, probably Monday. 

        Jimmy