Beyonce and Jay-Z Not Married, Media Take Out Wrong Again
The Questionable Validity of the Key "source" on the Wedding Left Doubts
Mediatakeout.com is "the most visited Black website in the world," according to advertisements on their own homepage. The website features the latest gossip from the Black community. According to killerstartups.com, the site makes it "easy as pie" to create your own account and start publishing celebrity "news." The site provides a quote from Media Take Out that reads: ". . . Mediatakeout.com has become the leading source of urban gossip on the internet."
The fact that the site admits providing gossip-news does not seem to have dissuaded other online sources from running the Beyonce/Jay-Z wedding story. Nor has the fact that this is not the first time Media Take Out has run such a story. In late 2006, the website came out with another story focusing on Beyonce and allegations that she may have lied about her age. Media Take Out claimed a source provided them with Beyonce's official birth records. It was later confirmed that the records were not official birth records and the date they provided was not, in fact, Beyonce's birth date.
Media Take Out doesn't seem to do much to help defend their validity as a source of information. The website's "About Us" page does little to say who or what the site is. Instead, it serves as a duplicate of their contact page, where viewers find a list of contact information if they want to send in tips, request videos, advertise, or put a celebrity "ON BLAST". In an interview with Exposzure.com, Media Take Out's founder, Fred Mwangaguhunga, discusses the background of the site but does little to defend its authority on any of the gossip it reports. In a two-part interview with Euweb, Mwangaguhunga does little to help the case of his site.
He openly states that he and his "reporters" do not rely on interviews with the celebrities or representatives of the celebrities the website publishes news about. In a statement that left Mwangaguhunga's interviewer "dumbfounded," Mwangaguhunga compared the way his staff gathers news to the way reporters in Iraq gather news about the war: "When the New York Times reports on what's going on in Iraq," he states, ". . . the reporters on the ground are talking to people in Iraq who are giving them the stories."
Whether or not this is a case of falsified gossip or simply misinformation has yet to be determined. Yet one thing seems clear. If this turns out to be yet another bit of poor media coverage provided by Mediatakeout.com, the site will likely have a hard time convincing its audience that anything they report can be taken at face value. Then again, when is celebrity gossip ever taken at face value?
Published by Khara E. House - Featured Contributor in Arts & Entertainment
Khara House is a Featured Arts & Entertainment contributor with a passion for creativity in any form. Khara writes primarily on the topics of Arts & Entertainment, Creative Writing, and Education. Her work c... View profile
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- Allegations of Beyonce and Jay-Z's secret wedding are now said to be false.
- Mediatakeout.com is known for its questionable reporting record.
- The Singer/Rapper couple had allegedly wed in Paris, France.
4 Comments
Post a CommentShe can do sooo much better. If I had a dollar for every marriage or pregnancy rumour, my bank account would look like Beyonce's
MTO is funny to me. Beyonce does have a tattoo on her finger but then again, it could be photoshop. Good job on reporting this.
Interesting. Thank You fer sharin'. Merry Chistmas. ;-}}>
Agreed, Mike. I did a lot of background searching on them before writing this-- and it was not pretty! Fred, the founder, does a terrible job of defending himself and his site in interviews, and openly admits that they don't rely on good sources (if any, at times) for the "news" they report. When asked why he didn't just ask one of the celebrities he's chosen to feature whether information provided about him was true or not, his reply was simply "I don't think he'd be interested in talking to us."