On Saturday, I made light of a story about an alleged "investigation" of Air America Radio, based on a story published in something called the "Bronx News". It spread out along the Right Blogosphere like gangbusters, and was picked up by the various Moonie/Murdoch media organs without having advanced much further than the original allegations. Contrary to these stories, there is still no evidence to date that Air America itself is under criminal investigation, although it did agree several months ago to repay money that had been diverted to it by a Bronx-based charity.

As it turns out, there actually is an honest-to-goodness paper called the Bronx News. It is a weekly paper published by a company called Hagedorn Communications, Inc., which also publishes several other throwaways, including "The Real Estate Weekly", the "Parkchester News", the "Town & Village News", and the "Co-Op City News". H.C.I. has not yet embraced the world wide web, unfortunately, and the only way I could be certain that the above papers actually existed was a reference in Nexis to a couple of articles published in the Real Estate Weekly.

The circulation of each of these papers is minimal, to say the least. According to a NY Times article in 1993, the "Bronx News" had a circulation of 7,150 (in a borough of 1.36 million); in comparison, the Village Voice weekly has a circulation rate of 260,000. Mr. Hagedorn himself got into some trouble at that time for inflating the circulation of his weeklies by a factor of between 1.5 and 2, including the Bronx News, and plead guilty to a charge of falsifying business records in April, 1993. That any MSM organs would pay serious attention to a story from such a paper, especially one based entirely on anonymous sources (even "informed" anonymous sources), without performing due diligence first, is mindboggling.