Did the Associated Press totally get hosed with one of the most infamous journalism hoaxes of recent memory? Maybe! Maybe not!

An article making its way through the wire service today reports that "researchers say they have discovered groups of the silver-haired monkeys in Indonesia that fish. Groups of long-tailed macaques were observed four times over the past eight years scooping up small fish with their hands and eating them along rivers in East Kalimantan and North Sumatra provinces, according to researchers from The Nature Conservancy and the Great Ape Trust. The species had been known to eat fruit and forage for crabs and insects, but never before fish from rivers."

Huh. Because back in 2001, Slate writer Jay Forman wrote about something very similar, only about monkeys in the Florida Keys, not Indonesia — and they weren't the ones doing the fishing. Rather, locals (of the human variety) were baiting rhesus monkeys with apples. And then, in Feb. 2007, he admitted to making the entire story up.

As the Museum of Hoaxes remembers it: "The column was a colorful piece of reporting full of vivid observations about the art of monkey fishing. Who would have guessed, for instance, that oranges are the fruit of choice for baiting monkeys? But almost as soon as the article was published it attracted criticism. The Wall Street Journal didn’t believe a word of it, declaring that, “Slate Gets Hoaxed.” Michael Kinsley, Slate’s editor, fired back, insisting that his magazine stood behind the veracity of the story. But under the weight of continuing criticism Kinsley backed down. On June 25 he published an apology, acknowledging that key details in Forman’s story were fictitious."

So now that we've reversed the story here – with the monkeys doing the fishing – can we trust this new monkey fishing report?

CONTINUED »