Friday, December 10, 2010

Gordon in the morning: First with the news

Everyone knows Debbie Harry's "I was picked up by Ted Bundy" story, right? Harry was telling people about it back in the 1980s, and it's right up there with 'Marianne Faithfull and half a Mars bar' and 'heart attack after eating a ham sandwich' stock half-true myths that circulate around pop music.

Amazingly, Gordon Smart is repeating it today as if it was news.

What makes it even worse is that - whoever was in the car that Harry got into - it wasn't Ted Bundy. I know Smart's habit of running stories that aren't true is well known, but surely this is the first time he's ever run a story that's been debunked by Snopes.com - Bundy never went to New York, where Harry's incident happened; the car Bundy drove was nothing like the car Harry described and Bundy hadn't started his spree at the time Harry was meant to be the first victim.

Doubtless Gordon will be clearing space tomorrow for an exclusive: 'Charles Manson auditioned for the Monkees'.

(To be fair to Gordon, The Telegraph also trots out hoary-old-anecdote-as-breaking-news.)


1 comment:

Mikey said...

Crikey, that first sentence in the Telegraph piece is a clunker isn't it?

"The front-woman of 70s rockers disclosed that she could have been the first of the mass killer's 30 victims"

Post a Comment

As a general rule, posts will only be deleted if they reek of spam.