Fake News: Hulu Did NOT Cancel Michelle Wolf's Standup Special After Disgustisting Attacks

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk
Fake News: Hulu Did NOT Cancel Michelle Wolf's Standup Special After Disgustisting Attacks

Was Michelle Wolf's standup special cancelled by Hulu after her appearance at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner? No, that's not true. The news came from a site set up to purposely spread fake news to troll conservatives and Trump supporters into sharing it so they can be mocked for believing things that are not true.

The Hulu story originated from an article published on April 29, 2018 on Daily World Update titled "BREAKING: Hulu Cancels Michelle Wolf's Standup Special After Disgustisting Attacks" (archived here) which opened:

Michelle Wolf was hoping to use the White House Correspondents' Dinner to promote her sure-to-be-terrible standup special due to be released on Hulu soon, but her plan backfired magnificently when she attacked White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders' looks.

Wolf compared Sanders to the monstrously ugly Aunt Lydia on the anti-Christian show The Handmaid's Tale and said that the Press Secretary's eyes were "smoky" in appearance -- a reference to liberals' claim that her face is (as Bill Maher put it) "as lopsided as a half-weighted fishing lure."

A statement put out by Hulu President Irwin R. Fletcher explains that "in light of recent remarks made by Michelle Wolf, we have elected to cancel the standup special" -- a huge blow to the former Daily Show writer's ego and income.

Users on social media only saw this title, description and thumbnail and for some of them that was enough to share it:

BREAKING: Hulu Cancels Michelle Wolf's Standup Special After Disgustisting Attacks

Guess she shouldn't have 'cried Wolf.'

But there is no Hulu president named Irwin R. Fletcher as you can check for yourself here.

And Daily World Update comes with a clear satire disclaimer at the bottom of each article:

sat·ire ~ˈsaˌtī(ə)r
noun
the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, OR ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
If you disagree with the definition of satire or have decided it is synonymous with "comedy," you should really just move along.

The owner and main writer of the site is self-professed liberal troll Christopher Blair, a man from Maine who has made it his full time job to troll gullible conservatives and Trump supporters into liking and sharing his articles. He runs several other websites, including potatriotpost.us, dailyworldupdate.us and nofakenewsonline.us. Sometimes he is also known under his nickname "Busta Troll". A second man working on the sites is John Prager as revealed in this earlier story we wrote.

Articles from Blair's sites frequently get copied by "real" fake news sites who often omit the satire disclaimer and any other hints the stories are fake. Blair has tried to get these sites shut down in the past but new ones keep cropping up and he keeps knocking them down.

If you see one of his stories on a site that does not contain a satire disclaimer, assume it is fake news. If you do see the satire disclaimer it is of course also fake news.

We wrote about dailyworldupdate.us before, here are our most recent articles that mention the site:

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  Maarten Schenk

Lead Stories co-founder Maarten Schenk is our resident expert on fake news and hoax websites. He likes to go beyond just debunking trending fake news stories and is endlessly fascinated by the dazzling variety of psychological and technical tricks used by the people and networks who intentionally spread made-up things on the internet.  He can often be found at conferences and events about fake news, disinformation and fact checking when he is not in his office in Belgium monitoring and tracking the latest fake article to go viral.

Read more about or contact Maarten Schenk

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