Nowadays we are used to any controversial content going viral in a matter of hours thanks to social networks. But the situation was very different 25 years ago when people were not yet aware of the great impact that the Internet, and especially social networks, was going to have on our lives.
Even though at that time we did not use mobile devices or computers, the controversial content of the day managed to attract the attention of the audience, to the point that the next morning nothing else was talked about. Television generated all kinds of content day after day, and although many have already been forgotten, today many continue to remember one of the biggest hoaxes on the small screen, starring Ricky Martín himself.
Surely many remember the media hoax called ''Ricky Martin, the dog and the jam'', which took place on the well-known program Surprise, Surprise!, presented by Concha Velasco. It all happened in 1999 when the famous Antena 3 format invited the Puerto Rican singer to surprise a fifteen-year-old follower.
Supposedly, the artist appeared in the video inside a closet in a room full of hidden cameras. Suddenly, the supposed fan came to her room, she undressed, spread jam on her genital area and called her dog to lick the jam while all of Spain watched the scene live.
However, the program was the victim of a hoax and the bizarre scene never happened. The network's management team asked the director of the format for explanations and immediately began to review all the content broadcast, since for a moment they doubted what they had broadcast live.
For its part, Ricky Martin's team demanded that the program deny the images. Furthermore, due to the speed with which the false rumor spread, the association in defense of children's rights Prodeni even filed a lawsuit against the production that forced the Prosecutor's Office and the Ombudsman for Children in Madrid to investigate what happened.
After the media commotion generated by the fake news, Concha Velasco had to go live days later to deny what happened. "We have been victims of a hoax. They have attacked us in a kind of collective madness. An attack in which they talked about something that never happened and protagonists who have never existed. There has been a lot of talk about that and we want to do it today by saying only 3 words: Everything is a lie," he stated.
