Gossip site Gawker posts Donald Trump’s cell phone number; but joke was on them
August 3, 2015 | Joe Saunders | 0 Comments
The guys and gals at Gawker probably thought they had a real good scoop on their hands Monday morning when the gossip site published a post with a cell phone number it claimed belongs to billionaire Donald Trump.
And it did it with a cute graphic.
But Trump’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination says: Wrong Number.
“It’s a very old number,” the campaign wrote in an email,according to Breitbart. “This is not one he uses. Mr. Trump has several numbers so he has not experienced any issues.”
What got Gawker going, of course, was Trump’s decision last month to hold up a board with South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s phone number on it (a decision that sparked its own footnote in political history when Graham decided to make a video of himself destroying the phone. The “silly season” certainly came early this cycle.)
But being a gossip site with pretensions to journalism (“Today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news”), the Gawker piece came complete with a series of pretentious questions callers could ask Trump if indeed he answered the outdated number the website had provided. (It will surprise no one that the questions had a liberal bent.)
Any readers who call it expecting to get through to The Donald are going to be disappointed. It’s answered by an automated message informing callers that the mailbox is full.
What Gawker hoped to get out of the stunt — beyond the undeniable click bait — is open to question. But one thing it did get, as word spread about it, was ridicule on social media.
And lots of it — even from people who don’t like Trump at all.
Read more:
http://www.bizpacreview.com/2015/08/03/gossip-site-gawker-posts-donald-trumps-cell-phone-number-but-joke-was-on-them-232840#ixzz3hr3t9kgk
