That's real dedication

When a newsmagazine ran a cover story on General Muhammad Naguib, shortly after he became Egypt's first president in 1953, the writer said that Naguib was such a modest man that his name didn't appear among "the 000 people listed in Who's Who in the Middle East" and that he refused to live in "the royal palace, surrounded by an 00-foot-high wall". A cable was sent to a Cairo stringer to fill in the data. The magazine never heard from the stringer, so they rewrote the story so that the numbers were not needed. Later, they received a cable that looked like this: I AM IN JAIL AND ALLOWED SEND ONLY ONE CABLE SINCE WAS ARRESTED WHILE MEASURING FIFTEEN FOOT WALL OUTSIDE PALACE AND HAVE JUST FINISHED COUNTING THIRTY EIGHT THOUSAND FIVE HUNDERED TWENTY TWO NAMES WHOS WHO IN MIDEAST.

That's from a wonderful article on fact checkers and their work, in the Columbia Journalism Review. (Thanks to Romenesko's Media News, one of the two or three websites I read every day, for the link.)