Beheading video a hoax

Associated Press:

An aspiring politician and video game designer who faked his own beheading by Iraqi militants set off a short-lived media frenzy Saturday after media around the world began showing his homemade video of the gruesome hoax.

Benjamin Vanderford, 22, said he posted the 55-second clip, which shows a knife sawing against his neck, on an online file-sharing network in May. It circulated in cyberspace before crossing over to major media, airing on Arab television.

It also appeared in Agence France-Presse, which, last time I looked, wasn't an Arabic television network.

Here's a Yahoo slide show on the incident.

I'm not sympathetic to hoaxsters who think they're making a point of some sort with these kinds of ruses. But it reinforces the need for journalists to pick up the phone, search on Google, and do some digging instead of just reporting what other news outlets are reporting.

Later: Just learned that early reports were wrong. The bogus video was staged not in San Francisco but in a garage at a friend's house in Pleasanton. That's where I live.