Paul Horner (November 5, 1978 – September 18, 2017) was an American writer, comedian and contributor to fake news websites. Horner has been described as a "hoax artist" by outlets such as The Associated Press, The Chicago Tribune, PolitiFact and The Washington Post.
Early life
Horner was born on November 5, 1978, in Minnesota. There he grew up with his family and brother until they moved to Arizona when they became adolescents. Horner developed an interest in politics at an early age, often sketching and creating political cartoons before becoming a writer and web contributor.
Lead writer for National Report
Horner was lead writer of the website National Report since the site's launch.
One of his widest-spread fake stories was a piece claiming artist Banksy had been arrested and his identity revealed as Paul Horner, which Horner posted in 2013 and was re-circulated in 2014 and once again in 2017.
Horner is still listed as a possible suspect behind Banksy's true identity and some even believe Banksy could be Horner's creation. Random art sightings claiming to be works of art by Banksy stating "Paul Horner I come for you" turned out to be hoaxes by Horner.
Due to one of Horner's stories, former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer had to go on live television to insist that she was not implementing mandatory gay to straight programs in all Arizona K-12 schools. Fox News did a live broadcast about one of Horner's stories as being factual: Barack Obama had personally funded a Muslim museum so it could stay open during the government shutdown of 2013.
A stir was caused across the Internet as St. George, Utah, was the focus of an article posted on National Report claiming the city had made pornography illegal with first-time offenders receiving 30 days in jail.
Departure and launch of News Examiner
Horner left National Report in 2014, launched News Examiner at the start of 2015 and also started numerous websites including abcnews.com.co, cnn.com.de, cbsnews.com.co and nbc.com.co (note that domains ending in “.co” are registered in Colombia as that is its official two-letter abbreviation, and Colombia allows non-Colombians to register such domains because of the similarity to “.com” as a way to get a similar-looking domain if the equivalent “.com” is taken) to post fake news articles, as well as ABCnews.com.co. In 2015, he wrote a fake story that Yelp was suing South Park that received wide circulation.
By 2015, he had written several fake stories about DeQuincy, Louisiana, which said that the town had been under attack from gay zombies, had legalized polygamy, and had banned twerking, discussing the color of any dress (in response to the viral story about the dress), and Koreans; he told a local news station that he originally targeted it because "my friend Brandon Adams said there is like 4,000 people that live there, and all they do is drink Old Milwaukee's Best and beat their wives" and that he kept targeting it because he had received death and castration threats in response to his first story. One of his stories about DeQuincy, and one that he says is one of his favorites, was about a man who stopped a robbery in a diner by quoting Pulp Fiction; the story was posted on the Miramax website. In 2016, one of Horner's stories about Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán escaping from prison for a third time, forced the Mexican government to tweet images of the drug kingpin behind bars to dispel rumors of the escape.
2016 U.S. presidential election
His stories had an "enormous impact" on the 2016 U.S. presidential election according to CBS News; they consistently appeared in Google's top news search results, were shared widely on Facebook and were taken seriously and shared by third parties such as Trump presidential campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Eric Trump, ABC News and Fox News. Horner later claimed that his work during this period was intended "to make Trump's supporters look like idiots for sharing my stories".
In a November 2016 interview with The Washington Post, Horner expressed regret for the role his fake news stories played in the election and surprise at how gullible people were in treating his stories as news. In February 2017 Horner said,
Stephen Colbert mocked Horner on The Late Show as did other television/talk show hosts.
In December 2016, while speaking on Anderson Cooper 360°, Horner said that all news is fake news and called CNN "fake news", which was one month before Donald Trump leveled the same criticism at that network.