Bill Keller. (Scott Gries/Getty Images) Those people who woke up today and checked Twitter before (or rather than) opening up their New York Times were treated to what appeared to be a rather impassioned defense of WikiLeaks by former Times executive editor Bill Keller. While the piece acknowledges his "turbulent relationship with WikiLeaks and its Guru-In-Chief Julian Assange," it goes on to say that:
You don’t have to embrace Assange as a kindred spirit to believe that what he did in publishing those cables falls under the protection of the First Amendment. [...] I’ve said repeatedly, in print and in a variety of public forums, that I would regard an attempt to criminalize WikiLeaks’ publication of these documents as an attack on all of us, and I believe the mainstream media should come to his defense.
Turns out these two sentences actually were written by Keller, but not in the Times — they were sent in an e-mail to GigaOM's Matthew Ingram about four days ago. Everything else about the op-ed, however, is a hoax. As is the incredibly convincing webpage, which is not at the regular Times domain but rather at the slightly tweaked http://www.opinion-nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/keller-a-post-postscript.html, which was registered back on March 30. The Bill Keller Twitter account that first tweeted the story is also fake — perceptive Flickrer qthrul noticed it lacked the little blue "verified" symbol, and that "Bill" was spelled not with two lower-case l's but with an upper-case i and a lower-case l.
As for who's behind this little bit of media trickery: Storify's Josh Stearns tracked two of the earliest re-tweets of the story to WikiLeaks- and Anonymous-related Twitter accounts, though so far no one has stepped forward to claim their work.
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