Izvestia recalled the most memorable April Fools' jokes of journalists

On April Fools' Day, which traditionally takes place on April 1, many people do not forbid themselves to arrange all kinds of practical jokes and the media are no exception. Izvestia recalled the most incredible jokes about the public, which were taken at face value.

So, in 1957, the BBC television channel released a report on the unprecedented spaghetti harvest in Switzerland, which allegedly happened due to the mild winter and the successful destruction of the macaroni beetle. The British, for whom Italian spaghetti was a kind of delicacy in the middle of the last century, which they consumed in canned form with tomato sauce, took the joke seriously.

The program was watched by 8 million people, and the day after the report was released, the TV channel's editorial office was inundated with requests to tell them where to get pasta seedlings and how to grow pasta trees.

On April 1, 1982, two American newspapers from Connecticut, Gazette and Compass, were bought by the Soviet state agency TASS, and the management of the publications decided to make fun of their readers. In their editorial articles, they reported that simultaneously with the transfer of the newspapers to the new owner, their publishers died as a result of a "hunting accident." They allegedly accidentally shot each other in the back of the head with rifles used by the Soviet army.

The article also said that now the newspapers will be published completely red. After that, readers who took the articles seriously called the newspaper offices and stated that they were unsubscribing from the publications. Moreover, one of the residents of the state stated that he had long suspected that sooner or later the Communists would take power over all newspapers in the United States.

Before that, pranksters tested gullible citizens with a landline phone, which was the main way to communicate from a distance.

Read more in the exclusive Izvestia article:

In full curiosity: how the media fooled the public on April 1st