Iranian News Agency Claims Onion Report It Ran by Mistake Is Essentially True
Irans Fars News Agency admitted on Sunday that its report, Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad To Obama, was copied entirely from The Onion, a satirical American publication the editors in Tehran mistook for a news source.
An editor at the Iranian agency, which is close to the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, said in the long, somewhat grudging apology: The news item was extracted from the satirical magazine, The Onion, by mistake and it was taken down from the agencys English-language Web site within two hours.
The unnamed editor went on to argue that the premise of the Onion report that Irans president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is more popular with white, rural Americans than President Obama might even be accurate, if fictional. Although it does not justify our mistake, he said, we do believe that if a free opinion poll is conducted in the U.S., a majority of Americans would prefer anyone outside the U.S. political system to President Barack Obama.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/iranian-news-agency-claims-onion-report-it-ran-by-mistake-is-essentially-true/
"Irans president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is more popular with white, rural Americans than President Obama".
While Obama is not very popular with rural whites in general, I think the Iranian media may be slightly exaggerating the popularity of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with those same rural whites.