The history behind the chocolate hoax - Columbia Journalism Review

How much chocolate does it take to fool a journalist? Turns out not much. Earlier this month, Peter Onneken and Diana Löbl, a pair of documentary filmmakers from Germany, and John Bohannon, a biologist and science journalist based at Harvard, revealed that they had tricked millions of people—including their peers at The Daily Star, Cosmopolitan’s

The hoax exposed how easy it can be to turn shoddy research into headline-making news. They pulled it off with little more than a mock clinical trial, some cooked statistics, and one fake website—plus a small army of journalists..,