Gazette writer admits fabricating stories

By John Breneman

The Humor Gazette today accepted the resignation
of star reporter Arturo Dimanche after it was revealed the
five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee fabricated his most sensational
fake news exclusives.

The revelation casts doubt on Dimanche’s report
that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas flashed the Republicans
an "OK" sign before voting with the 5-4 majority
to give George W. Bush the 2000 election. Also now under suspicion,
his ominous August 2001 interview with Osama bin Laden’s former
butler.

Editors at the Gazette said the final straw
came when a disheveled Dimanche stumbled into the newsroom
reeking of single-malt aftershave, saying he’d "just
flown in on the 8:15 from Afghanistan" with a scoop that
Jacko was harboring Osama and plying him with "Allah
juice" in a secret room at Neverland II in the mountains
west of Kabul.

Mindful of the recent journalism scandals involving
Jayson Blair of the New York Times and Jack Kelley of USA
Today, editors questioned him about the reliability of his
information. Dimanche feigned indignation and said he was
ready to blow the lid off a scandal linking Harken and Halliburton
and Saudi slush funds to a White House scheme to let oil despoil
the political environment.

As Dimanche chattered on about Martha Stewart’s
sumptuous Nigerian yellow cake and Donald Rumsfeld’s secret
stash of weapons of mass destruction, the rogue reporter was
confronted with a $1,400 expense account tab for a large pepperoni
delivered to his New York apartment from Slobo’s Pizza in
the former Yugoslavia.

A subsequent investigation revealed "irregularities"
in his reporting on Dick Cheney’s undisclosed love bunker
and George W. Bush’s malignant fib-nose.
Even his acclaimed his four-part series on journalistic integrity
was found to contain phony quotes attributed to Walter Cronkite,
Roger Mudd and Geraldo Rivera.

The Gazette announced it has withdrawn past
Pulitzer nominations for Dimanche’s graphic account of an
Al Qaeda recruitment toga party and his spellbinding feature
on an 8-year-old heroin-addicted millionaire day trader named
Lil G.

His editors say, in retrospect, they should
have noticed red flags like his tendency to file stories datelined
from around the globe within 15 minutes of leaving the newsroom.
One editor now admits he should have been more suspicious
when Dimanche said he was calling from a firefight in war-torn
Kosovo, but the background sounded more like a big-screen
football party in a crowded bar.

As the trail of deception unraveled the Gazette
discovered Dimanche also falsified his resume, listing a Ph.D.
from the prestigious-sounding but nonexistent Harvard School
of Journalism when, in fact, he dropped out of 9th grade after
being caught plagiarizing a report on "Honest Abe"
Lincoln.

His claims to have been a former New York Times
reporter, a military intelligence expert and heir to the Grey
Poupon mustard fortune, also proved false.

Dimanche now plans to hit the talk-show circuit
promoting his new book "Lying Lies I Told You Gullible
Morons." And though he claims to take "personal
responsibility" for his transgressions, the fabricateur
du jour devotes much of his memoir to blaming undiagnosed
bipolar agoraphobia, booze, drugs and a basic American lust
for fame and money.

To prevent future abuses of the public trust,
the Humor Gazette has instituted new policies that involve
scrapping the once-useful honor system in favor random urine,
DNA and polygraph testing. The paper is continuing its probe
into the record of disgraced fake journalist Arturo Dimanche.