NY Post takes down GameStop/real estate story after being duped

The New York Post has deleted a story after being duped by a 22-year-old who claimed he’d taken out a second mortgage on his parents’ home and used the money to invest in GameStop stock, reports Reed Richardson of Mediaite.

Richardson writes, “Post reporter Mary K. Jacob privately messaged him to follow up and ask him his reasoning and how he feels about taking such a big risk. But in an act of glaring journalistic malpractice, she never asked for any actual verification about key parts of his story, including his many dubious claims about the process of taking a second mortgage on a house he didn’t own or how he got the money so quickly, none of which apparently raised any red flags to her.

“‘His parents have no clue about his decision to take out a second mortgage on their behalf,’ Jacob wrote. ‘West apparently made the move on Monday via a zoom call (without the camera on) with his hometown bank and the money took a couple of days to kick in.’

“After the story got published, a stunned West called out the Post and laid out on his Twitter account the timeline for how the paper got so easily duped.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.