CASPER, Wyo. – Police made a routine traffic stop early Thursday morning and got more than they bargained for when Roy Tilbott, 51, stepped out of his El Camino for a field sobriety test . . .
I’m pretty good at spotting a fake news story. To me, they’re all pretty obvious. Not to brag or anything. I took one look at this story and said to myself, “It’s phony.” And I was right. It is. Still, we can learn a lot from the fake news stories that circulate on the Internet, maybe more than we can learn from the genuine ones. The question of WHY certain stories get spread around is of interest to the psychologist and the sociologist. What is it about those stories that snags the public’s attention? What is it about THIS story? A guy smuggling eyeballs up his rectum from a slaughterhouse, to use in making soup to treat his erectile dysfunction. (There were people who actually thought this article was REAL?)
Look at the history of human folklore, though, and you’ll see that this one fits the pattern. It’s gross, bloody. Most of them are. There’s a sexual element; it pokes fun at the problem of E.D. There’s the connection with scatology (the human fascination with feces and defecation, usually for humorous purposes, which I don’t get, but whatever). This is exactly the kind of story that becomes a part of collective folklore, factual or not.
