Iranian News Agency Claims Onion Report It Ran by Mistake Is Essentially True
Iran’s 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 agency’s English-language Web site within two hours.
The unnamed editor went on to argue that the premise of the Onion report — that Iran’s 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/
"Iran’s 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. 
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