The American Spectator

Earlier this morning, Breitbart News had posted an article about Paul Krugman filing for bankruptcy after years of lavish spending, seeming to show the irony of someone recommending big spending being done in by those policies on a personal level.

It is a story that has been making its way around the web for a few days, and was picked up at the relatively reputable Boston.com except that it appears to have been posted by a blogger rather than a reporter. That blogger picked up the story from an Austrian magazine, Format. The Austrian magazine noted at the end of the piece that they got the story from the web site The Daily Currant which is a satire site, like an online version of The Onion.

In short, the story about Krugman going bankrupt is an amusing bit of satire, one which many non-leftists might hope to be true — but which isn’t true.

If you see the story being passed around as fact, you are now armed with the truth. I don’t like seeing “our side” passing around untruths because it makes us seem less credible. To be clear, the story was obviously explicitly satire given the source, and the fault with making it seem as if it were a real story lies with those who aren’t doing the one minute of fact-checking needed to recognize where it came from.