Major UK news titles caught out in space tourism fake news scandal

It’s been quite a week in the world of space, but all the week’s events fall into insignificance compared to the ‘news’ that Cornwall Spaceport were planning to take UK tourists to Australia within 90 minutes. Before writing this, we thought it was best to double-check our calendar in case it was actually 1st April, and we had somehow lost complete track of all time. Thankfully, the calendar confirmed it wasn’t April Fools’ Day and that the news outlets reporting the story were either absolute idiots just sheepishly repeating a story they had seen on Twitter, or they knew exactly what they were doing and in which case they just believed their readers to be absolute idiots. So, here’s how it went. Daily Mirror:

Cornwall Live:

ConservativeChitChat

The Sun:

Somebody called Sheila:

BBC Radio 4 Today:

The Daily Mail:

So, did they stop when ACTUAL Spaceport Cornwall stepped in and put them all right, stating categorically that they had absolutely no plans to take passengers to Australia or anywhere else for that matter? ACTUAL Spaceport Cornwall, who probably know better than anyone else whether it’s true or not:

Nope, the loyal journalists right across the country kept blindly plugging the absolute outright lie… The Daily Star:

Even when Spaceport Cornwall stepped in again and said: “Guys, please stop this! It isn’t funny any more. It simply isn’t true. You are all telling absolute lies. We aren’t sending anybody into space, and we aren’t building a fancy terminal”, the papers continued:

They were even repeating the lie as far as in Australia, where it was actually shown on TV. 7NewsBrisbane:

So there we have it. The old saying “never let the truth get in the way of a good story” is applicable today more than ever before.