During the recent election, the U.K. government promised a vote on overturning 2004's ban on fox-hunting, the psychopathic British bloodsport whereby foxes are ripped to shreds by dogs after being chased to exhaustion. Newspapers there have relentlessly worked the controversy, most lately as a media hysteria around the alleged danger that foxes present to humans.
To prove that the "idiotic" British press will sensationalize anything fed to it on the matter without any fact-checking, two pranksters faked a deliberately ridiculous 'Urban Fox Hunt' and put the video on the Internet. It worked so well that their scalps included not just tabloids, but also the Guardian, the Times and the BBC.
One of the pranksters told the Guardian: "We wanted to create something that would be so ridiculous that in any other area it would be immediately dismissed as a spoof, but that news outlets desperate to continue the media narrative against foxes would leap on without any thought as to its authenticity."
Urban fox hunt video was hoax aimed at the media, say film-makers [Guardian]
