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The Hoax Museum Blog
Examining dubious claims and mischief of all kinds.
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A reporter for Inside Bay Area (I don't know his name... it's not given with the article) recently recounted how his granddaughter told him that the bear on the California flag was originally supposed to be a pear. Back in 1846, Capt. Jedediah Bartlett, leader of a band of rebels fighting against the Mexican authorities in California, supposedly drew up a flag for the future state. He thought a pear, as a symbol of the region's agriculture, would be a fitting symbol. But his instructions were misread and the flagmaker inserted a bear on the flag instead of a pear. The error was never rectified.

The Inside Bay Area reporter was a little suspicious when he heard this story, but he did some fact-checking, discovered the story was true, and shared this with his readers. What he should also have told his readers was that his fact-checking consisted simply of finding the story listed as true on Snopes and therefore assuming it had to be true. Two weeks later he was forced to admit his error. The story is not true. The California bear was not originally a pear.

In his mea culpa the reporter offered this excuse: "I decided to recount it when I checked a Web site that purports to investigate urban myths to determine their validity. The Web site pronounced it 'True.' So I passed it along. Bad idea."

In other words, he seems to be blaming his error on Snopes. What the guy doesn't seem to realize is that the Pear/Bear story is one of a handful of deliberately false stories that Snopes has on its site (it calls them Lost Legends), placed there precisely to trip up people who are too lazy to do thorough fact-checking. Snopes explains this if you click on the "More information about this page" link at the bottom of the Pear/Bear story (something the reporter evidently still has not gotten around to doing). Journalists should be proud to call this guy one of their own.
I've received a couple of emails about this article on Yahoo! News detailing a cosmic "chaos cloud" that will obliterate the earth in 2014:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Scared-stiff astronomers have detected a mysterious mass they've dubbed a "chaos cloud" that dissolves everything in its path, including comets, asteroids, planets and entire stars -- and it's headed directly toward Earth! Discovered April 6 by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the swirling, 10 million-mile- wide cosmic dust cloud has been likened to an "acid nebula" and is hurtling toward us at close to the speed of light -- making its estimated time of arrival 9:15 a.m. EDT on June 1, 2014.

If it's not immediately obvious by its subject matter that the story is a joke, then it's source (the Weekly World News) should be a giveaway. It joins the time-traveling insider trader and the bogus japanese-to-english phrase book as examples of WWN stories mistaken as news, thanks to Yahoo!'s policy of not listing them as satire in their news feed.
Whenever I see the opinion of a 'man on the street' quoted in a newspaper, I always wonder if the quote is for real since it would be so easy for a reporter to simply make something up without interviewing anyone. Now here's a case, at the Reidsville Review, where that actually happened. The reporters invented quotations, but, strangely enough, attributed the quotations to real people. They should have just gone ahead and put the phony quotes in the mouths of phony people:

The newspaper's "Two Cents Worth" feature includes a small picture of a person, along with their name and response to a question. But on several days in May the item apparently featured people who do not live in Reidsville and did not speak the words attributed to them... One of the people quoted in "Two Cents Worth" was Emma Burgin, a Greensboro resident and senior at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her name and photo appeared with a quote naming the Dave Matthews Band as her favorite musical group. Burgin said she was shocked to learn recently of her appearance in the paper, given that she has never visited Reidsville or been interviewed by a reporter from the paper. "I honestly never heard of the Reidsville paper before," Burgin said Wednesday during a telephone interview from Washington.
The latest nugget of fake news from the world of journalism concerns a seal hunt that never took place. A Boston Globe writer, Barbara Stewart, described the slaughter of baby seals off the coast of Newfoundland in great detail. What she didn't know was that the hunt had been delayed, and so hadn't begun yet. Oops.
As a representative of Westchester Cable Services, Mark Sabia has been allowed into press boxes at sports games for years. The one problem is that Westchester Cable Services doesn't exist. The teams finally figured out he didn't belong there (but it was a good scam while it lasted):

Sabia, who lives in Ossining, was arrested Monday when he showed up to cover Opening Day at Shea and was charged with scamming season passes for almost all of New York's professional teams, as well as for several World Series and League Championship Series dating to 1998. He was charged with five felony counts of falsifying business records and 16 misdemeanor counts ranging from petit larceny to criminal impersonation.
So this guy Jeff Gannon shows up at the White House and wants press credentials so that he can attend the President's press conference. But his real name isn't Jeff Gannon, and he isn't really a reporter, although he's been playing one on the internet for a few months. His experience as a journalist seems to consist of posting slightly reworded Republican press releases on the website of Talon News, which is a conservative news outlet that hardly anyone has heard of (and which is also a barely disguised front organization for Republican activists). Oh, and this Gannon character also claims to be a born-again, bible-thumping, red-necked conservative, but he also seems to be connected to the gay porn industry. So what does the White House do when this guy approaches them? Well, they immediately give him press credentials, of course, and allow him to attend the president's Jan. 26 press conference, during which the president actually calls on him and Gannon proceeds to ask a strange, kiss-ass question about how it's possible for republicans to work with democrats since democrats are so 'divorced from reality'. I can only see one possibility--that Gannon was a republican shill. A fake reporter planted in the audience in order to ask softball questions. Very strange. But Gannon himself sounds like such an unusual and contradictory character that you have to wonder if he was simply the pawn in some kind of Manchurian Candidate type of situation... a struggling gay porn actor brainwashed and transformed into an ultra-conservative republican white house reporter.
Here's a video going around showing what has to be, quite easily, the worst weather broadcast ever. It's so bad you begin to suspect that it was staged. But I don't think so. It seems to be a student-run news show broadcast by Ohio University Public Television. Not to be harsh, but this guy should really think about pursuing a different career. Reporting the weather doesn't seem to be his thing.
Update: Apparently there's a few more weird weathermen videos going around (weird weathermen must be the internet meme of the moment). One shows a weatherman in North Carolina who thinks he's way funnier than he actually is. And another one shows a Fox news weatherman who breaks out in an inexplicable bout of swearing on-air while the camera is rolling (not safe for work because of language).
I received an email containing this list of THE YEAR'S BEST [ACTUAL] HEADLINES OF 2004! But, of course, these aren't really headlines from 2004. This list has been going around for at least four years. Check out this competition from 2000 in which people created images to match some of these headlines. Plus, I doubt any of these were ever actual headlines either.

• Crack Found on Governor's Daughter.
• Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says.
• Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers.
• Iraqi Head Seeks Arms!
• Is There a Ring of Debris around Uranus?
• Prostitutes Appeal to Pope.
• Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over.
• Miners Refuse to Work after Death.
• War Dims Hope for Peace.
• If Strike Isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last Awhile.
• Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges.
• Man Struck By Lightning Faces Battery Charge.
• New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group.
• Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft.
• Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half.
• Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors.
• Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead.
• Police Chief says "when we find prostitutes on our streets, we stay on top of them".