Today in fake news: Google buys Apple

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Google Apple
For a brief moment, there was a report of Google buying Apple.
Photo: Google/Apple

It’s the kind of headline The Onion would write, except this one came from the Dow Jones Newswire: Google, Apple join to create tech giant

The breaking fake news Tuesday morning was eventually retracted by Dow Jones which blamed the report on a “technical error.”

Even the news consumer routinely suckered by fake headlines must have had some doubts when reading the brief story.

It read the “$9 billion deal” was arranged by late Apple founder Steve Jobs and included in his will, which supposedly triggered the acquisition.

The story also quoted Google employees, who were going to be moving to the Apple campus, as saying, “Yay!”

Below, is one of the news briefs released on the Dow Jones Newswire.

Google buying Apple
Dow Jones blames this story on a “technical error.”
Photo: Dow Jones

Dow Jones issued a statement that read, “Please disregard the headlines that ran on Dow Jones Newswires between 9:30 AM ET and 9:36 AM ET. Due to a technical error, the headlines were published. All of those headlines are being removed from the wires. We apologize for the error.”

Stocks in both Alphabet Inc and Apple Inc plunged as news of the false deal circulated but leveled off before the official retraction as traders realized the report had to be a joke, according to Elizabeth Balboa, a staff writer with the business news site Benzinga.

The website 9to5Mac broke the story with a headline implying the newswire was “hacked” but changed the headline after Dow Jones issued a retraction and apology.

Dow Jones did not elaborate on the error that led to the bogus report, though a Dow spokesperson told the tech news website Gizmodo, “We absolutely were not hacked.”

Source: 9to5Mac

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