I checked out their religion section, and was pretty disappointed to find out that geologists in Siberia have not managed to drill down to hell, that marking 'Jedi' as your religion on census forms will not force your government to grant it official status, and that the physician who once placed dying patients upon a scale in order to measure the weight of the human soul never existed. No, hold on, that one is apparently true.
OpinionJournal, by the way, picks up on another part of Seipp's article, in which she talks to folklore professor Jan Harold Brunvand about the media's role in spreading such urban legends.
"Brunvand, whose latest book is Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid: The Book of Scary Urban Legends (out in October), said that actually the media have been pretty good about correcting these tales.Does the Palestinian Authority qualify as 'faraway places'?
"But Brunvand added that 'Reuters is especially prone to circulating doubtful stories, especially those that have shown up in newspapers in faraway places. The Reuters story will just say, 'as reported in the such-and-such,' which is true enough, but they apparently make no attempt to verify or investigate the item.'
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