Fars News Agency, a semi-official mouth piece of the Iranian regime, earnestly published a word-for-word duplicate of an article from the Onion, a spoof news organisation based in Chicago.
The satirical article cited a fake Gallup poll which found that 77 per cent of white, rural voters would rather go to a baseball game or have a beer with Mr Ahmadinejad than with the US president.
It went on to cite a made-up West Virginian named Dale Swiderski, who said that he preferred the Iranian to Mr Obama because: "He takes national defense seriously, and he'd never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does."
Fars, which loyally prints the anti-Western and anti-Israeli tirades of senior Iranian officials, copied the entire Onion article without giving any indication of its source.
It printed the short bulletin in English but did not appear to have translated it into Farsi.