Media Research Failure/Other Media

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Media Research Failure examples from various sources.

  • Somewhere a Palaeontologist Is Crying each and every time that the mainstream media publishes anything remotely related to paleontology or biological evolution. There are paleo-geek blogs almost entirely built around this. Some of the most frequently published examples include such claims as:
    • "...the ancestor of X..." It's practically impossible to say that any given fossil is a direct and factual ancestor of any other organism, living or extinct. Evolution is complexly branched, and you are millions-to-one more likely to found an ancient relative (like would be a distant uncle or cousin which left no descendants, but still bears some similarities) than a direct ancestor (like a father or grandfather, that bears roughly the same similarities but did left descendants).
    • "The oldest relative of X has been discovered" (not only wrong because of what stated above, but the oldest relatives of any living being ever are the same original bacteria from which all life comes from. Your oldest relative is the same as your dog's and the baker's yeast you put on pizza doughs).
    • "Found the missing link between X and Y!" (the concept of a "missing link" is completely unscientific and misleading, transitional fossils are the closest thing, with a quite different meaning).
    • Another sad common mistake is adding random zeros. Is not like people is going to count them all. Dinosaurs got extinct 65.000.000.000 years ago? ugh, sure, it's not like that's several times the age of the universe.
    • Saying stuff like: "Humans and Neanderthals" when Neanderthals were a species (if not subspecies of Homo sapiens) of Humans (the genus Homo).
    • One that is almost as much a favourite of paleontologists publishing as it is of columnists reporting them; "The discovery of the oldest/largest dinosaur/whatever" (when there's clear evidence that it is not) Saying you found "the largest carnivore dinosaur" makes a much more interesting headline than "a considerably large carnivore dinosaur". This can be just the paleontologists wanting really bad to have had encountered the largest/oldest/coolest X and saying his or her latest find is just that. The paleontologist highlighting to the media the fact that the discovery is remarkably large/old/cool and the media just extrapolating that. And sometimes the media just making that part up completely.


  • This is a common way to treat the Furry Fandom; see also Acceptable Targets.
    • The "infamous" CSI episode did have a member of the fandom as a consultant, though apparently many of his suggestions were thrown out. The CSI fandom calmly responded to this kerfluffle by pointing out that CSI treats everybody like that. Of course, it wasn't just the sexuality part of the fandom that CSI got wrong, but also depictions of "fursuits", animal costumes worn by a small minority of furs. It failed in scope of the phenomenon, depiction of the suits (latex-lined fursuits which would in real life, suffocate you), and Fridge Logic in the episode itself (if a fursuit was built for sex, how does the suit prevent the victim's blood from spilling out?)
    • Exception: this Hartford Advocate article had its writer sneak into a real furry convention, see nothing that she expected to see, and reported honestly on what she did see (hint: it wasn't rampant sex).
      • There is, however, an error in the second paragraph where Ms. Abel confuses transvestites and transsexuals... especially since she brought the "trapped in an X's body" bit into it.
        • And they always "claim" to be "a woman trapped in a man's body". No exceptions.
    • On the subject of furries, there was a news article who followed this trope: They reported the name of the convention Anthrocon (Anthropomorphic Convention) as "Arthrocon", effectively ruining the name's meaning since "Arthro" refers to joints (as in arthritis, inflammation of the joints).
      • Have you ever seen the media ever portray the fandom as anything but "people in mascot costumes"? It's sad, especially since at Anthrocon '09, barely more than 1/6th of the attendants wore fursuits.
    • One episode of the Canadian series Being Erica had this wonderful bit of dialogue:

"Did you know there's a group of people who like to have sex in animal costumes? They're called plushies."

      • And to make things worse, they're talking about a mascot suit... shaped like a shark.
      • Plushies are what plushophiles (a subspecies of furries) call their plush companions. And on the topic of that, not all of them * ahem* "mount" their companions either. The Other Wiki, tho, states that plushophiles themselves are sometimes called plushies.
      • Plushies are also what children call their plush toys.
  • There's actually a handbook for people who want to do this, called How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard. It's surprisingly informative.
    • There's also How to Really Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Henry Hitchings.
  • The Something Awful column "Truth Media" is a parody of this, deliberately making error filled reviews hoping to attract flame wars and posting everything on the site.
  • In the early days of the Internet, many mainstream journalists wrote screeds against websites like Bonsai Kitten and Penguin Warehouse, believing them to be real. Here's a great example.
  • According to a local Russian newspaper, cosplay is a Japanese fashion style defined by padded shoulders and tight sleeves...
  • There were a number of news stories on Vladimir Putin's first web chat with the general public. Keep in mind that "the general public" includes "the Internet." Seeing the mainstream media have to find ways to describe questions about Humongous Mecha and Cthulhu was quite something.
  • Whenever the mainstream media report on Mixed Martial Arts, there is a very high possibility of them getting the details completely wrong.
    • The sport is often referred to as "ultimate fighting" based on the popularity of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. This is perhaps due to a misunderstanding of the name's connotations, assuming that the UFC is the championship of "ultimate fighting" rather than the ultimate championship of fighting. Mixed martial artists are also sometimes called "ultimate fighters" for similar reasons, even if they don't fight in the UFC. Zuffa, promoters of the UFC, even puts on a reality show called The Ultimate Fighter. Overall, Zuffa probably doesn't want to discourage their brand name being so strongly associated with the sport.
    • It's common to refer to MMA as "human cockfighting." When that term was originally coined, it was in reference to MMA's illegitimacy, not its supposed brutality. Since MMA is now a legitimate, sanctioned sport in many areas, the term no longer applies.
    • It's also commonly referred to as "cage fighting" to associate it with dogfighting, implying that the athletes are locked inside the arena and cannot escape from the fight. Of course, this is not true, and many MMA promotions actually take place in modified boxing rings. Some promotions embrace the word, such as World Extreme Cagefighting, to make themselves sound more Badass.
    • Many reports are apparently ignorant of MMA's ruleset, often claiming that MMA matches are no-holds-barred and generally emphasizing the violence rather than the numerous restrictions and safety measures. In fact, even the first UFC event, which was billed as having "no rules," did in fact have several rules.
    • Mainstream media loves to use the term "bloodsport" in reference to MMA to imply a heightened level of violence, in spite of the fact that boxing, kickboxing, and any traditional martial arts competition would also qualify as a bloodsport.
    • Zuffa is often miscredited with instituting rules and weight classes to the modern version of the sport, when in fact both existed when they bought the UFC. Zuffa's major early achievement was helping get the Nevada State Athletic Commission to sanction MMA.
  • An NPR broadcast a few years back about the history of many Christmas traditions. It's shocking to hear their description of the Yule log having originated with child sacrifice, and that "Yule Log" developed from a Norse phrase meaning "Child Log." This is especially entertaining since the tradition is primarily Celtic in origin, while the word "yule", as demonstrated by 5 minutes with Google and That Other Wiki, comes from a Norse feast (or so we think).
  • An Olympic Games commentator referred to London mayor Boris Johnson as dead Russian ex-President Boris Yeltsin a couple of times, without correction. He fixed it pretty quickly the next time he talked about him...
  • This article [dead link] in a Swedish newspaper has become a sort of local meme among Swedish computer geeks. The caption can be translated as: "Andreas Hedlund has looked over all imaginable software problems. He has started checking the hardware and come to the conclusion that the Mother Modem, the heart of the hard drive, isn't working."
  • This article on Yahoo! Tech blog [dead link] states that only 1.5% of computer users have DVD-ripping software installed, and only 1% of users actually use it, therefore DVD piracy isn't as big a problem as it's made out out be. Thereby revealing a) the blogger has no idea how piracy works, and b) has no idea how many people have computers. The really sad part is the comments agreeing with him.
  • Referring to the internet as "the internets" and similar. Ian Hislop (probably) parodied this with "The YouTube" on Have I Got News for You.
    • Parodied in Top Gear, with quotes like: "If you are lucky enough to live near an internet, why not visit our website, which you can find at...a computer, probably."
    • Toby Keith's song "American Ride" also refers to "the YouTube".
  • Also, confusing "the Internet" and "the World Wide Web." is this CNN article from 2009. The Internet is the much older, more versatile network; the Web is only the most visible use of the network. Email, for one thing, is an example of something on the Internet that is not (necessarily) part of the Web.
  • "Something Awful is a Cult that supports drug use, rape, racism, illegal use of firearms, harassment, piracy and child pornography. We exist to expose the cult that is Something Awful and the mastermind behind it Richard Kyanka.(link is here) [1]
    • Given the userbase's notorious Jerkass antics and extensive Me Too-ism, the "harassment" part may have a very tiny bit of truth to it.
      • The instigator of this claim, Dan Lirette, is a "open-air preacher" (Someone who yells religious statements in the parking lot of a Wallmart), who cheated on his wife with one of his followers, who he abandoned when she became pregnant. When the baby was born with no brain, the mother snapped and went insane; which is where Something Awful joined the story as someone noticed her blog. There was just as much pity as mockery, since she obviously wasn't well mentally, and when Lirette's involvement, which included such tactful statements as "The baby's not dead until I kick it in the head", was discovered; all the attention and much deserved mockery turned to him. Lowtax wasn't even involved, having moved to a much more hands-off role, until Lirette sent threatening emails to him.
  • An article that defined "slash fiction" as stories where fans put other authors' characters into new, imagined situations. Um... well... they certainly are new most of the time. And imagined...
  • Dublin University student Shane Fitzgerald planted a fake quote about death on famous, then-recently deceased composer Maurice Jarre's Wikipedia page. For over a month, newspapers were using it as fact before he finally came forward and confessed.
    • Similarly, when the previously-almost-unknown Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg became the new German economics minister, someone gave him an additional middle name on the German Wikipedia. Cue almost every newspaper quoting it.
    • And when composer Ronnie Hazlehurst died, many media outlets (including the BBC) reported the "fact" that he was the joint composer of S Club 7's hit "Reach" -- which turned out to have been planted on his Wikipedia page by some joker a few days before his death.
  • In the BBC's nostalgia documentary "I Love 1984", one segment focuses on the Transformers, which debuted in that year. A few seconds features various celebrities talking about Soundwave (the Decepticon communications officer who transforms into a cassette player), while cartoon footage illustrates. Unfortunately, all the footage shown during this piece of commentary instead shows his Autobot counterpart, Blaster (who, unlike several characters who transform into the same thing, wasn't just a Palette Swap).
  • Can happen for important issues, too. The National Post, a Canadian newspaper, ran an article titled "Iran Eyes Badges for Jews" complete with a picture of Jews being persecuted in Nazi Germany. This had many unfortunate consequences as the Prime Minister mistook the story as factual. The Other Wiki has the relevant info here.
  • Possibly one of the biggest and most history making examples of this trope is when Alfred Nobel's brother died, but not Nobel. Some journalist thought it was Alfred, who at that time was mainly famous for inventing dynamite, and wrote a SCATHING obituary. Seeing the horror of how he would be remembered after his real death, Alfred founded the Nobel Prize.
  • In real life, there's at least a few preachers out there bebopping at their computers for the Lord to fight the worshippers of Buddha and Hindu, who lie on beds of nails and light themselves on fire for their pagan gods. Seriously.
  • The media at large seems pretty widely ignorant of what "Goth" actually is and means. The truth of the matter is that goth is a subculture with very vague boundaries, with no consensus beliefs on politics or religion, but instead, overlapping areas of interest in music, fashion, and general aesthetic. In other words, it's just a bunch of people who like similar music and looks. The media typically presents goth as being some sort of underground cult of black-metal loving, death-obsessed pagans, atheists, and Satan-worshippers.
    • Ostrogoths or visigoths?
    • And God help you if you're anything like a goth and you commit a crime. The media will crucify you.
  • The U.S.-published Investor's Business Daily bashed Obama's healthcare plan by comparing it to the UK's National Health Service, where apparently "the stories of people dying on a waiting list or being denied altogether read like a horror script" and where Stephen Hawking would most certainly be dead if he were British. Um... Stephen Hawking is British. And alive, thanks.
  • Firearms in news articles. Any black, vaguely military-styled rifle will invariably be described as a "machinegun", while any rifle with a telescopic sight will be described as a "sniper rifle". A good example being the Beltway Sniper attacks: the weapon used, a semi-automatic .223 caliber rifle equipped with an unmagnified optic, doesn't even remotely fit any military definition of a sniper rifle. This is often parodied [dead link] by gun enthusiasts.
    • The above has, naturally, had a detrimental effect on the layman's perceptions of firearms, with gross misidentifications of both make and type (semiautomatic vs fully automatic, etc.). This public firearm confusion was humorously referenced in an episode of Stargate SG-1, where two bit-player scientists were complaining about Jack's preference for an overly militaristic solution to the problem of the week, one of them saying, "He's too busy polishing his M-16", at which point Jack holds up his gun where they can see it and says, "Actually it's a P90..."
    • In Polish media, a submachine gun is almost universally confused with a machine gun. And when it's not... One article wrote about Heckler & Koch MP 5: "the terrorists used Koch MP 5 and Heckler submachine guns".
    • This is actually the driving force behind a lot of attempts to limit or outright ban civilian access to firearms - the Clinton Assault Weapons Ban in particular banned a lot of things (pistol grips, folding stocks, etc.) that don't make guns any more dangerous than normal, they just looked scary to the uninformed politicians behind it.
  • A Finnish tabloid Iltalehti published an article on their page about a bridge made of trash collapsing in Shanghai, China. While that may have been true, before a headdesk on their forums, they cited Sankaku Complex as the source, calling it a Chinese magazine, all the while using an un-cropped screencapture of the post in question, with ads and channel previews showing...
  • A 2009 New York Times article about psychologists outraged over the posting of the Rorschach inkblot test on The Other Wiki briefly mentioned that the inkblots had been featured on other websites, but the implication was clear that the inkblots had only recently become available to the public. In fact, the outlines of all the inkblots, along with commentary on "good" and "bad" answers for what they represent, were published in William Poundstone's 1983 book Big Secrets and most of the websites with the test copied the blots and commentary from Poundstone's book verbatim.
  • This article in a Polish newspaper about the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games, featuring an image of the three Winter Olympic mascots... and the Internet meme Pedobear.
  • In 2007 there was a legendary Fox 11 report about the denizens of 4chan and the other 'chans, referring to them as "Anonymous", and portraying them as mafia-like domestic terrorists and evil hackers who gather on secret underground websites. (While in fact, nobody used "Anonymous" as a collective name at the time, they're not hackers, the site is publicly available, and although it's true that they can be very mean in their pranks, they're not nearly as much of a threat as the report implied.) It all caused not so many heads to be banged against walls as it caused arses to be laughed off. Among other things, it actually coined the now widely used name "Anonymous", and introduced instantaneous memes such as "hackers on steroids", "internet hate machine" and dogs and closed curtains being Anonymous' only weakness.
    • Ironically, in both this case and a similar Fox 11 report on trolls in general, the station is universally mistaken for Fox News Channel when, in fact, they have virtually nothing to do with one another, its just an affiliate of FOX, the separate broadcast network. Another recent example of this occurred when someone posted a news clip claiming that "Fox News attacks bronies". However, the clip came from a St. Louis Fox affiliate, and not the Fox News Channel. The stations the Fox network owns and operates, are run by the head of Fox News, which makes some of the confusion (Fox owns stations in several major cities) understandable from a practical standpoint.
  • A common mistake when papers report on naval combat is to claim that any ship which doesn't go underwater or carry planes is a battleship. The correct term for any naval vessel is warship -- there is not a single battleship in service in any navy in the world as of 1995 (when USS Missouri was officially removed from service for the last time). Only nine still exist in the world, all as museums (Alabama, Iowa, Massachusetts, Mikasa, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin) and all but one (the British-built Japanese ship Mikasa, the oldest among them) are American. The four Iowa class battleships, now museums, are required to be maintained in a manner that would facilitate their reactivation in event of a major war, but their high maintenance, the lack of anyone trained in 16 inch gun operation, and use of parts that are no longer produced make that doubtful.
  • Wednesday, March 24th, 2010. Associated Press Writer Nirmala George reports that "a tiny rock island" named New Moore Island in the Bay of Bengal has vanished due to rising sea levels. The facts, New Moore Island was a sandbar that first appeared sometime in 1974 near South Talpatti Island, never was more than two meters above sea level, had a maximum size at low tide equivalent to a mid sized Wal-Mart and none of the rest of the river estuary has "vanished beneath the waves". Sedimentary islands in river deltas arise and are destroyed constantly all over the world. Erosion giveth, erosion taketh away.
  • In an Indianapolis high school, there was an underage drinking scandal, and the Indianapolis Star misspelled multiple names. Which is extremely pathetic, because it was published right next to a list of graduating seniors submitted by the school.
  • When the September 2009 G20 came to Pittsburgh, a BBC reporter did an article, "Pittsburgh steeled to be host city", and included a photo of the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team playing at PNC park. The caption reads "The Pittsburgh Pirates are a symbol of the city's transformation." which sounds very nice. Unfortunately in reality the Pirates were near the end of their 17th consecutive losing season at the time! Gee, thanks for the compliment.
  • Rest assured, dear tropers, that the "nonexistence" of dear old Triceratops has been highly exaggerated. But you wouldn't know from articles like this one. This story is fast becoming a fine example of why the mainstream news probably should just stop reporting on science stories at all: they fail to understand how scientific nomenclature works, happily report this fringe theory as a universally accepted fact, and seem to be of the opinion that Triceratops (who doesn't give a crap what name us puny humans call it by anyway) has somehow vanished from the fossil record altogether. A far, far better report on the "Toroceratops" theory can be read here.
  • In Steve Birnbaum's guidebooks for the Disney Theme Parks, the description for Muppet*Vision 3D states Waldo C. Graphic to be a new character created for the attraction. Waldo actually first appeared in The Jim Henson Hour about a year prior to Muppet*Vision 3-D's opening.
  • The popular news meme of Al Gore claiming to have "invented the Internet" comes from misrepresenting a statement he made in which he took credit for passing legislation that created the Internet.
  • The Chilean TV magazine TV grama had a section that mentioned the children programming highlights of the week in order to advertise a cable company. The description for each featured show were very inaccurate. They stated that Cow and Chicken lived in a stable and sometimes they summarized the premise as "Cow loves his younger brother Chicken, but doesn't understand why he tries to stifle her"; They confused Goosebumps with Are You Afraid of the Dark?; they described Legends of the Hidden Temple as an actual adventure series rather than a game show, and so. Also, at the end of the shorter descriptions it always said "check the new episodes of this animated series", regardless if the statement fits at all.
  • A sheriff's department in California issued a warning about Pedobear, believing it to be a character pedophiles themselves use to lure children.
    • They also hilariously state that pedophiles use Pedobear as a mascot. Because if there's one thing every pedophile wants, it's a highly recognizable image to attach to themselves that identifies them as a pedophile. In reality, Pedobear is more often used as a way of drawing negative attention to a person when they say or do something pedophilic. By insinuating that a person is acting like Pedobear, it immediately alerts people familiar with the character to the fact that the person might be up to something. It actually does much more to combat pedophilia than it ever did to aid it.
  • BBC news and even Popular Science reported that a recent study proves plants can think. The study in question does NOT prove that.
  • In 1992, the New York Times published a list of "grunge slang," all of which was entirely made up by Megan Jesper, the receptionist at Sub Pop Records who was getting sick and tired of media outlets calling for general information about "grunge".
  • When legendary baseball manager Sparky Anderson passed away, Yahoo's headline read "The Hall of Famer was the only manager to win World Series titles in both leagues." Except he wasn't. Sparky was the first, but Tony LaRussa did it also, managing the 1989 Oakland Athletics (American League) and the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals (National League) to championships.
  • Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe recently[when?] wrote a letter blasting Sea World about using AI, specifically mentioning Tillikum and a youtube video. The problem is, the video in question is of ULISES who is a different male at a facility across the country. Oops.
  • European media outlets continue to refer to Indy Car under the name of a former rival sanctioning body, even more than 3 years after its decline and demise.
  • According to Fox News, Ipv6 isn't backwards compatible.
  • A British tabloid newspaper once ran an article with the headline "KILLED BY CHIPS" about a "boy" who died because he ate the aforementioned food ("fries" in American English). It turned out that (1) the "boy" was 20 years old (two years into adulthood) and (2) he didn't die because he ate chips, he died because he didn't eat anything else.
  • According to a German news program covering the operation to take out bin Laden, the Navy SEAL emblem is exactly identical to the Maquis. EVEN THE KLINGON SKULL.
  • According to a lot of American news sources and talk radio (especially conservative shows), Socialism is a political ideology, not an economic one (although any economic system that puts the means of production in state hands—the technical definition of socialism—has a lot of political implications). For that matter, most people only really know of Communism and Libertarianism as the Theme Park Version, at best.
    • American sources also often have trouble distinguishing between socialism and liberalism: although there can be a lot of overlap, they are two distinct ideologies with very different origins and aims. Useful note: Obama cannot, under any circumstances, be accurately described as a socialist.
      • Liberalism is also a rather sliding scale; in many Northern-European countries Barack Obama would be classified as a moderate conservative.
        • Being a moderate conservative does not stop one from being a liberal as well.
  • The captions in this Esquire Magazine YouTube video about basic firearm handling helpfully inform us that the weapon being demonstrated is "A Glock & Wesson 45mm FPO designed in 1789 by Colt Koch". This is the part where your brain spontaneously implodes while attempting to parse that statement.
  • An article in a British newspaper reporting on the accidental death of a student referred to the deceased as having attended "Brookes College" at the University of Oxford. In fact, the student had been a member of Oxford Brookes University, a completely separate and unrelated institution.
  • Mainstream articles on fan fiction invariably represent all of it as badly written smut composed in equal measure by twelve-year-old girls and bored middle-aged housewives.
  • Read here for an example from 2001, wherein an inactive play-by-email roleplaying game from the 80s-90s, by way of sheer coincidence (the game was set in a town called Greendale), was assumed by many uninformed news reporters to be related to the anthrax attacks that fall.
  • A few years ago, a Finnish internet celebrity Pasi Viheraho contacted Finland's National Bureau of Investigation and questioned their internet censorship policies. When Viheraho asked why Google isn't censored, the representative of the bureau gave the infamous reply: "Google is not a website; it's a browser". The release of Google Chrome made this Hilarious in Hindsight.
  • The depiction of Anonymous in the media. Evil hacker group set out to destroy all vans, or international internet freedom fighters willing to go to certain lengths to keep the internet free and open? Or just your average computer nerd, sick and tired of political bores trying to censor what they don't understand, using the aforementioned guise to distract them from the fact that DDOS-ing their site is all he knows how to do? Or maybe they are internet superheroes from another dimension? Or all of the above? Or none of the above? It's better not to dwell on it.
  • According to Entertainment Weekly, horse semen is consumed in Australia and New Zealand as a delicacy. It doesn't take ever visiting either country to know how obviously incorrect that is.
    • To be fair, there was one bar in New Zealand that for a short time featured apple flavoured horse semen shots that did actually sell. Though it was mostly done as a marketing gimmick, and obviously it's not a widespread practice across that country and Australia as that EW article implies. Most New Zealanders were probably just as grossed out as everyone else who heard about it.
      • I certainly was.
  • When the Dutch abuse report was released in 2011 showing how the 20,000 children were abused in Catholic homes during a period of 60 years, newpapers quickly seized upon the story... except the report specifically said: "The Commission of Inquiry investigated how great the risk of unwanted sexual contact with children was in institutions (boarding schools, private schools, seminaries, children’s homes). It emerged that the risk was twice as high as the national average, but with no significant difference between Roman Catholic and non-Roman Catholic institutions., destroying the idea that Catholics were wholly responsible.
    • Every study has found roughly the same thing—and actually fathers and teachers are the most likely to molest, well over twice as likely as any clergy.
  • Laughed at in the first polish console games magazine Neo Plus, in the column named Omega Boost Za Frajer(ów) (wordplay: Omega Boost for free as well as Omega Boost in exchange for dumbass(es)), in which the editors actually rewarded every reader that sent some media article containing mistakes connected to video games with copy of this great PS shoot'em up.
  • Another entry for the "memes misunderstood in the news" file was the "Pool's Closed" meme. It's kind of an obscure meme, but you can read up on it here. Long story short, it was conceived as a protest in response to rumours that mods on an online game were being discriminatory. The meme image consists of a black man in a suit with an afro and the words "Pool's Closed" underneath him. Someone put the image up at a pool in the real world, presumably as a joke. And naturally, someone cried "Racism!" Putting aside the fact that the meme is actually anti-racist, it's really an ambiguous image that could mean any number of things. But according to at least one person, it somehow means no black kids are allowed in the pool.
  • Before the release of David Lynch's film version of Dune, Sting was featured on the cover of Rolling Stone in his Feyd costume against the backdrop of Arrakis. The headline? "Policeman on Mars."
    • While technically incorrect, this headline is not as wrong as first perceived. First he's referred to as a Policeman because Sting was the bassist of the band The Police and as such, a Policeman. While he's not on Mars per se, it is often used as an expression for "in space".
  • Similar to the entry on paleontology above, practically everything the media -- any media -- does that includes psychology will be an example of this trope. It's especially glaring in shows like Criminal Minds, which, despite being all about psychology, will get much more wrong than it will right.
  • This CNN.com opinion piece by Timothy Stanley criticizing the Eurovision Song Contest. You can immediately tell This Is Gonna Suck when the author describes the show as "Europe's version of American Idol". Not only that, he appears to be completely misinformed about the qualification process, saying that host nation Azerbaijan shouldn't be participating because it's not in the European Union. All that is required is that the country be a member of the European Broadcasting Union.
  • Parodied by a T-shirt design which first appeared circa 2018, depicting a dalek with the caption "OMG! It's R2-D2! I loved him in Star Trek!"
  • In the aftermath of the OceanGate submersible implosion in 2023, various mainstream news sources described the Logitech F710 gamepad used to steer the sub as a "knock-off PlayStation controller", never mind the fact that it was an XInput (i.e. Xbox 360-based) pad for computers from an otherwise reputable brand, not a peripheral for Sony-branded consoles.
  1. ↑ Well I wouldn't call it a 'cult'...
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