Snow stealer: ex-State Duma deputy Tumanov admitted to fakes

“No one was looking for confirmation, everyone diligently repeated it!”

The country’s chief gardener revealed the kitchen of made-up news. Meteorological winter has arrived in Moscow, and, you must admit, it was difficult for hacienda owners to ignore the headline “Dacha residents have been named a method to combat snow thieves.” The article in the federal publication talked about how Russian summer residents, dumping snow from someone else’s plot onto their own, can receive a fine (from 500 rubles). The lawyer importantly commented on the informational occasion.

– They hit the nail on the head by contacting me. This is a fake that was invented by none other than me,” the famous gardener Andrei Tumanov admitted with a smile in a conversation with MK. – It was a long time ago, 15-20 years ago, in the “Vremechko” program with Lev Novozhenov, I wrote news for them then. The news block of this program was 100% invented – that was their style. I came up with a huge amount of this kind of news for them. Then, as a rule, they were rebroadcast by different news agencies. When the news agency started checking the news, and I usually pointed out settlements, of which there are many, such as “Pervomayskoe”, or even indicated, for example, the Tambov region, the news people started calling there and, as a rule, local journalists confirmed this! Imagine, they call the editor-in-chief of a local newspaper, and he pumped up his journalists: “How so?! There in Moscow they know that such an interesting thing happened here, but you don’t know!” And look for them in all directions. And they found it! The most meticulous ones got to the bottom of the source of information – they pulled a thread and found me.

I answered them: “Next time you will be left without such nice news. Therefore, it is better to confirm and say that this is how it happened.” The journalists thought of something else and wrote specific reports: place, time, participants. Twice foreign TV crews came to me based on these fakes, one from Japan. Then I came up with such bullshit that the police detained my grandfather, who illegally installed a road sign with a speed limit of 40 km per hour. The local resident who installed the sign swore that he did it for the sake of traffic safety, because there are often accidents here, but the local grandmothers betrayed him and said that his grandfather sells sauerkraut and has long noticed that the slower the cars drive, the greater his profit. . That is why he installed such a sign, although he did not admit it. Well, the Japanese wanted to film a report about this grandfather, and they sent a special TV crew. A mediator has already contacted me and begged: “How is this “invented”? I already received the money!” In general, the film crew filmed a report, and it was even shown on some world news.

This news lives its own life: first it circulates in news agencies, in their different interpretations, then on the Internet. A funny fake that paints a sad information agenda where everything is bad. By the way, I always made them so that they would not harm anyone, no one could really confirm them, but at the same time they would bring irony, fun and laughter into life. As a rule, no one looked for confirmation; everyone just obediently repeated them. The news about the fine for snow comes from this opera.

Journalists have already tried them: about fines and summer residents – this is rating news. Everyone, in arithmetic progression, begins to send them to each other with the words “Oh, what these goats and bastards have come up with!” You saw for yourself how the news spread. MK is the only media outlet that has questioned it. Many have long understood that lawyers (commenting on such news) are cunning, journalists are stupid, so it is possible to manipulate information in this way so that it scores points. In fact, I have been fighting fakes about fines for the last five years. They are constantly being dumped into the information field. Remember how many horror stories there were about various punishments in rubles. And no one was ever fined. And there was noise – who knows how much! In short, there is no need to stuff people with ugly news feeds that really scare people,” Tumanov concluded, “create fun news feeds, like I did.