Two years ago, Wattsupwiththat demolished a crackpot story published on CBS (here and here). As stated in the second article, CBS wrongly attributed the story to Associated Press and then killed it without publishing a retraction.
At some time since, that story has been restored on the CBS site, and here is today's screenshot with a bit of surrounding material to prove the date of the screenshot:
Is it really necessary to explain why this story is such a howler? But take this lesson from it: you can make the most absurd rubbish sound credible to those who don't take the trouble to learn a tiny, tiny amount of science. I'm not talking advanced physics, just reading a popular science book or two (and surely anyone who considers themselves educated should have done that some time in their life?). The questions remain: why did not CBS publish a retraction when they pulled the story two years ago? (Heck, why could not any of their science reporters spot the idiocy of it?) Why did they restore it at some time since then? And why is it still wrongly credited to AP?
I suspect this was not a case of being crafty (pulling the story to get rid of the evidence and then putting it back on the sly when the hue and cry died down). More likely, it was bungling, arrogance, and sloppiness: they simply didn't care about the demolition done on this story at various blogs (remember, this was in the heyday of the scam when it had maximum public support), the disappearance was a bungle of some sort (maybe a database error, etc.) and the reappearance happened simply because the error got put right: no one cared about or tried to verify the correctness (or even the sanity!) of the story content or its attribution to AP.
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