Cowboy Be Bop At His Computer / Other Media

Cowboy BeBop at His Computer examples from various sources.

---

Asian Animation

• One official Chinese streaming service lists Lamput as an American series. It's actually from India.

Biology

• Artistic License – Paleontology kicks in 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. The entire fossil record ever discovered still only covers a tiny fraction of a percent of all the species that have existed on Earth, and you are millions-to-one more likely to find an ancient relative (like a distant uncle or cousin which left no descendants, but still bears some similarities) than a direct ancestor (like a father or grandfather, that has roughly the same features but did leave descendants).
  • "The oldest relative of X has been discovered": the oldest relatives of any living being ever are the same original self-replicating protein (or whatever it actually was) from which all life came. Your oldest relative is the same as your dog's and the baker's yeast you put in pizza doughs.
    • "New study shows Y could be related to X": As the point above establishes, they're obviously related if they're both Earth-based life forms. This one, however, depends on the use of 'related' in its vernacular form - direct descent or a relatively close relationship.
  • "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).
  • When making use of any number larger than 999, it is very important to use the correct number of zeroes. News articles and magazines have occasionally made highly unusual claims - such as that the dinosaurs became extinct before the beginning of the Universe - by losing track of their zeroes.
  • Saying stuff like: "Humans and Neanderthals" when Neanderthals were a species (if not subspecies of Homo sapiens) of Humans (the genus Homo).^note The name Neanderthals comes from the modern spelling of the location in Germany where the species was first discovered. So, saying Neanderthals as if it's a separate species is incorrect. Also most people of European descent have some Neanderthal DNA, suggesting that the species interbred at some point.
  • 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 their 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.
  • Referring to "Brontosaurus". It was recognised back in the 1930s that "Brontosaurus" was misnamed; what people thought was Brontosaurus was actually just a different species of Apatosaurus that someone had misidentified as a new genus. Nevertheless, the mistake sticks around; it doesn't help that so many textbooks and articles in palaeontology refer to "Brontosaurus" and so many people are familiar with it palaeontologists have debated keeping "Brontosaurus" around as an acceptable alternative name for Apatosaurus.
    • And now Brontosaurus is considered a separate genus again.
  • Articles discussing feathers on dinosaurs have a tendency to get facts mixed up. Articles on birds and dinosaurs are especially prone to this.
• Not to mention pretty much any description of evolution that includes "human" and "monkey" in the same sentence. This includes "Evolution says humans came from monkeys!" and "How can there still be monkeys?". What modern modified natural selection theory states is that two different groups of proto-simians experienced different environmental pressures, leading one to adopt monkey-like traits and the other to adopt ape-like traits.
  • And the "how can there still be monkeys?" argument is like pointing out that most white Americans are descended from Europeans, and asking "how can there still be Europeans?". "Are descended from" does not equal "replaced".
  • "Where's the missing link?" As was mentioned above, even if 'missing link' were a real concept, you wouldn't encounter them for much the same reason you don't encounter pharaohs in Egypt anymore.
  • This is actually an ongoing controversy in some biology circles, especially due to the transition from Linnean taxonomy to cladistic modeling, which basically says you are whatever your ancestors were... and there are a few biologists that say that since the oldest "Old World" monkey is a monkey, then all of its descendants, including apes and humans, are monkeys also. Some opposed to this have actually named the group "Old World primates" to compensate.
  • Most descriptions refer to apes and humans as two separate things. Humans actually are a type of ape.
• Any statement that evolution takes place in individuals, Pokémon-style. Here's an informative video using Pokémon to demonstrate.
• Any statement that implies an ongoing controversy in the mainstream scientific community as to the validity of evolutionary theory, when in fact any such debate ended more than 200 years ago (virtually no professional biologist would doubt the theory's credibility in the 21st century). There does remain some debate as to how evolution works precisely, but virtually anyone with a decent science education will tell you that evolution is indeed a real process. The popular media also frequently conflates the scientific meanings of "theory" (a well-substantiated explanation for some aspect of the natural world that makes falsifiable predictions as to how it will behave, and is supported by multiple strands of independent evidence) and "hypothesis" (which is closer to the layman's definition of "theory", a hunch or conjecture which may have some evidence to back it up, but ultimately has not yet been thoroughly tested through the scientific method).
• 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.
• BBC news and even Popular Science reported that a recent study proves plants can think. The study in question does NOT prove that.
• A large number of those who oppose homosexual rights say that animals never engage in homosexuality. They are wrong.
• This article refers to the thylacine (also known as the Tasmanian tiger) as a wildcat, despite also correctly referring to it as a marsupial. Since it is a marsupial, it's no more a wildcat than it is a whale, despite somewhat resembling a cat or dog.
  • Quolls were also often referred to as "wildcats", despite looking more like rats or mustelids, and being dasyuromorphs (like the thylacine or the Tasmanian devil). This ended in the 1960s, when the Australian Aboriginal name was adopted as the official one.
  • This Cracked article claims that the Virginia opossum is descended from the saber-toothed tiger. It appears to not only be confusing the sabre-toothed tiger (which, being a feline, is not related to possums of any sort) with the Tasmanian tiger, but would also still be wrong if you swapped one for the other, since Thylacines and opossums have little in common apart from being marsupials (and neither could be descended from the other even if they were related - they've both existed at the same time, and as mentioned above regarding humans and monkeys, evolution doesn't quite work that way).
• Most people believe that most quadrupeds (including cats and dogs) have backwards knees. The backwards joint is actually their ankle. They have normal (forward facing) knees further up, but they are mostly hidden under their fur and hard to spot unless you examine the animal closely, thus the misconception.
• Contrary to popular belief, no animals can see in complete darkness, which is impossible by definition, as seeing involves photons bouncing off one's eyes, and complete darkness would be the absence of all photons. Many animals can see better than humans in poor lighting, while those that live in total darkness usually rely on some kind of Bizarre Alien Senses to perceive their environments.

Chemistry & Drugs

• Archival Documents from the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs: "April 14, 1939 ... Luminol was an early version of a "rape drug" which induced trances and memory loss in those receiving it." ... Forensic investigators use Luminol to detect trace amounts of blood at crime scenes. ... But, if they meant Luminal, another name for Phenobarbital, well then that's a lot more sensible, "Phenobarbital's soporific, sedative and hypnotic properties were well known in 1912".
• Most, if not all, of the new evil drugs of the 2010s ("bath salts", "krokodil", "spice", "legal weed", "poppers", etc.) are synthetic derivatives of controlled substances. To skirt U.S. drug laws, they are sold as a wide variety of innocuous products like substances for pipe cleaning, bath salts, or potpourri, slapping a "not for human consumption" warning on for good measure. Pull up any given article or video on them, and you'd think there's a brand new drug out there that's making people into cannibals and/or zombies or having their own flesh eaten (by the very drug itself!) from the inside out. A very cursory knowledge of biology and chemistry are the only things necessary to find out that unregulated drugs can have unexpected and very nasty side effects, none of these synthetic derivatives have wide usage (except as "potpourri", and so on...) and may well be chemically unstable (be it inherently, for lack of better production means, or due to the lack of regulation). ...but try finding THAT (at least mainstream) news article.
  • And, naturally, a disturbing amount of anti-drug propaganda, past and present: people on LSD burning their eyes out staring at the sun, Reefer Madness, MDMA eating large chunks of your brain, and the list goes on for a very long while.
• Contrary to popular belief, meth and PCP don't give people Super-Strength or toughness. They actually just make it so the person can't feel pain, as such, they aren't hindered by injuries or muscle fatigue. Indeed, trying to perform some feat of strength while on these drugs can result in permanent muscle damage from over-exertion.

Computing & the Internet

• This article◊ 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 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.
• 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. Also, the internet was invented in 1968, not 1969.
• When German radio channel WDR 2 reported on the Bielefeld Conspiracy they claimed Usenet was the predecessor to the Internet, apparently confusing it with the ARP Anet. Usenet is actually a term for newsgroups, which, like e-mail, continue to be used over the Internet. The report also failed to point out that the Bielefeld Conspiracy parodied conspiracy theories (they called it a satire but did not elaborate), fueling the misconception that the denial of the existence of Bielefeld, rather than the city itself, was the conspiracy.
• 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.
• UK newspapers tend to be clueless about the internet generally; for instance, there were howls of outrage when the BBC spent £100,000 on purchasing bbc.com, and "only" used it as a redirector to its main bbc.co.uk site. Those critics are clearly unaware that (1) £100,000 is a typical price for a short, pre-owned .com domain, and (2) using it as a redirector is the usual reason for purchasing an alternative version of one's URL.
• In one early British computer magazine of the 8-bit era, the editor kept insisting (even in the light of corrections from knowledgeable readers) that the difference between compilers and interpreters was "academic" — until the issue where he learned the hard way just how wrong he was, by wasting three pages of the mag on a worthless hex-dump of the workspace of an interpreted BASIC program. The mag didn't last very long after that.
• "Hacking" (programming, particularly reverse-engineering the source code of a game in order to devise cheats) is often misused to mean "breaking the security of computer systems", for which the correct term is "cracking". The Raspberry Pi Foundation is attempting to reclaim "hacking" in its proper meaning.
• Some news outlets have reported that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230) encourages platforms to keep their head in the sand about content moderation for fear of losing their special status as platforms. In reality, CDA 230 says "interactive computer services" (the word "platform" isn't mentioned) aren't liable for removing third-party content deemed objectionable, and generally aren't liable for the actions of their users. The law that ultimately protects American websites which host objectionable and hateful content is the First Amendment, not CDA 230.
• In a blog post about the history of P2P, there are a few factual errors in this post. ARP Anet was made in 1968, not 1969; also, while Usenet was first conceived in 1979, it wasn't made in it. In fact, it was made in 1980.
• In an article about the history of file sharing, the writer of the article claims that FTP was launched in 1985, when it was actually launched in 1971. BB Ses were an early staple of file sharing, not just Usenet.
• In a USA Today article about whether GIF is pronounced ''gif'' or ''jif'', the writer calls GIFs video loops. GIFs are an image file format, not a video file format.
• In an article about extracting frames from videos, the article says that videos are made from a succession of many scenes. Videos are actually made of a succession of still images in a quick display, not scenes, while scenes are different from images in that they're part of a film.

Countries & Places

• Gerald Ford's infamous gaffe declaring that "there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe". You can tell the moderator's struggling not to crack up.
• The book The Beach Boys: The Definitive Diary of America's Greatest Band On Stage and In The Studio by Keith Badman opens with a bizarre section that allegedly describes the history of Hawthorne, California, the LA suburb where the Wilson brothers grew up. In fact, it's the history of Hawthorne, Florida, a tiny town located 2,500 miles away.
• Rick Santorum managed to cause an international incident via use of this trope. With the Dutch. By spouting off about how the Netherlands euthanizes ten percent of its elderly, therefore they're afraid to go into hospitals, so voluntary euthanasia is bad! Needless to say, the Dutch were not amused.^note This isn't all that surprising when you consider that the Netherlands is basically the living embodiment of everything the radical right hates, via high taxes, universal health care, voluntary euthanasia, decriminalization of pot, legalized prostitution and gay marriage, etc., but still, Rick Santorum managed to cause an international incident with the Dutch of all people.
  • The Dutch are more often victim to such Cowboys Bebop in US Conservative issues. There was a politician who compared drug related crime numbers favourably for the USA, when in reality the numbers are highly in favor for the Dutch approach. His excuse: "But it's only for local political consideration."
    Erik Mouthaan: (to Rachel Maddow) If all your viewers would start a country, it would be Holland.^note Er, actually it would be "the Netherlands"; 'Holland' is just one province thereof.
  • And, most infamously, during the hearings on the repeal of "Don't Ask Don't Tell" in 2010, someone claimed that the reason Dutch forces failed at Srebrenica was due to the Dutch military's acceptance of gay people. He was dismissed by the Dutch Prime Minister, Ministry of Defense and public at large.^note Srebrenica is such a gigantic Berserk Button in the Netherlands that when a report was published on the massacre in 2002, it prompted the government to resign.
• Countless sources have said that in 1977, Walmart bought out a chain called Mohr-Value, which operated stores in Michigan and Illinois. Mohr-Value was never in Michigan, but it did have stores in Missouri. This likely stems from confusion over postal abbreviations: Missouri is MO, Michigan is MI. Walmart did not arrive in Michigan until 1990.
• It has often been claimed by Americans — including no less a personage than Bill Clinton — that the United States is the most diverse democracy on Earth. Problem is, that is not even close to being true, as India — which has been a full democracy for seven decades — has the U.S. beat by every metric of diversity. For starters, the U.S. is three-quarters Caucasian (assuming Hispanic-Americans are counted as Caucasian, and they usually are); India, meanwhile, is home to overwhelming numbers of Caucasians (mostly Indo-Aryan, with a few white Europeans), Australoids^note South Asians of so-called Negrito stock and East Asians, not to mention the untold millions whose makeup is a mixture of these races. And in the U.S. only two languages are primarily spoken: English and Spanish, both of which are Indo-European; in India, seventeen times as many languages are spoken by sizable populations, some of which are totally unrelated to each other (although, admittedly, almost all of them are influenced by Sanskrit and Hindi). As for religion, the U.S. is about 85 percent nominally Christian, while in India the ratios between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs are much more equitable. Even in a few European democracies — Switzerland, to give one example — there is near-parity among different Christian denominations, whereas Protestants outnumber Catholics at least two to one in the U.S.
• Nobody was seriously expecting Nazis to pop up in one of Donald Trump's ad campaigns. Nevertheless, it happened by accident and the Internet had a field day with it.
• It's often thought that tourists can visit the Statue Of Liberty's torch. In reality, her torch has been barred from visitors since 1916, when the Black Tom Explosion damaged it. Some people swear they remember visiting the torch, however, they most likely actually went to the inside of the crown and mistook it for the inside of the torch (as people tend to expect the crown to be much bigger than it is in reality).

Food & Cuisine

• It's an extremely common error in media of all kinds to confuse sushi (vinegared rice) with sashimi (raw fish).
• Chinese cuisine is a common target of these in non-Chinese cooking media. A few prime examples:
  • Not every spicy dish from Sichuan that has Sichuan peppercorns is in the málà (numbing and spicy) flavor profile (which focuses on setting both the spiciness of the chillis and the numbingness of the peppercorns to maximum). While it's true that many Sichuanese dishes do use both chillis and Sichuan peppercorns, most use one as a supporting flavor for the other (usually using a small amount of peppercorns to balance the heat of fiery chillis) or both as part of a blend of diverse spices in concert (see: basically any Sichuan dish in the five-spice flavor profile—Sichuan peppercorns are usually one of the five spices, and there will usually be chillis in it because Sichuan, but both flavors will be part of a more complex aromatic bouquet). Indeed, possibly the most common Sichuan flavor profile, jiācháng or "homestyle", mostly uses both the chillis and the Sichuan peppercorns (if at all) to support and add interest to a base of funky, savory doubanjiang chili bean paste (basically a slightly spicy chunky broad bean miso). Many dishes use only one or the other on their own. Kung Pao chicken, for instance, traditionally only uses a small amount of Sichuan peppercorn (maybe half a teaspoon's worth for a typical 4-6-serving recipe) as a complement to the fairly large amount of chili in the dish—it's not supposed to be enough that you detect a numbing sensation. Nevertheless, foreign recipe writers seem to insist on adding a mountain of peppercorns to Kung Pao—for instance, Serious Eats (which is normally pretty good with getting recipes right) calls for 1-2 tablespoons of peppercorns, which (unless you're using really bad peppercorns) is more than enough to get a strong numbing kick.
  • Moving to a dish that actually is in the málà profile, the YouTube channel Chinese Cooking Demystified dedicated an entire video to explaining in excruciating detail the multiple levels of wrongness in the dish that The Professional Chef (an otherwise excellent American culinary-school textbook) presented as the Sichuanese classic Mapo tofu. The major ones:
    • Traditional Mapo tofu is a braise or stew. The dish in The Professional Chef is a stir-fry.
    • Traditional Mapo tofu calls for cubed soft tofu, perhaps firmed up slightly by blanching in salted water. The cookbook calls for triangles of firm tofu, deep-fried.
    • Traditional Mapo tofu optionally uses a small amount of crisped minced or ground beef or pork to flavor and give richness and umami to the braising liquid—almost more like an aromatic or a spice than anything else, and certainly not a primary ingredient. It's such a minor point that cooks in China frequently omit it entirely. The cookbook uses a massive amount of ground beef, enough to make it a major component.
    • Setting aside the fact that Mapo tofu isn't actually a stir-fry, traditional Chinese stir-fries typically have a clear focus on a protein or on a vegetable. If there's both in a dish, one or the other will be the main player and the other ingredients will be there to complement and support it. The Professional Chef's version has roughly equal portions of tofu, ground beef, and vegetables.
    • Similarly, the cookbook's recipe calls for all of the vegetables to be thrown in the wok at once. This is basically never done in China, since different vegetables take different amounts of time to cook to the correct doneness. Cantonese chefs go so far as to cook each component^note Which can consist of multiple ingredients if they all happen to have similar cooking times of a stir-fry separately to the desired doneness, evacuting each component from the wok when done and recombining in the wok for a quick reheat with the sauce or seasoning at the end. Chefs in the other Chinese traditions aren't usually so paranoid, but do pay close attention to correctly timing the addition of each ingredient.
    • Chinese dishes generally adhere to the "shape rule"—major ingredients are usually cut into similar shapes so they cook more evenly and are easier to eat. The cookbook's dish has vastly different cuts for all its different ingredients—the tofu's in big triangles, but the bell peppers are in thin slivers, the mushrooms are in wide slivers, the snow peas are chopped in half widthwise, and the meat is ground. (Yes, the meat is ground in the traditional Chinese Mapo tofu, but it's just an optional seasoning, remember?^note For comparison, most Chinese dishes that use garlic—and it's a lot of them, especially in Sichuan and other parts of Southwest China—call for it to be minced, crushed, or pounded. In that form, some will stick to the main ingredients as you eat it, and the rest can safely just be left in the bowl when you're done since it isn't worth picking it out unless you're some kind of garlic fiend. This is what we mean by saying traditional Mapo tofu treats the meat like an aromatic—especially after you account for shrinkage due to melting fat, the amount of meat in the dish is closer to the amount of garlic and ginger in the dish than the amount of tofu.)
    • The cookbook's recipe also calls for so much food to be cooked at once that it would, if followed literally, crowd all but the largest woks (we're talking cafeteria kitchen-sized woks of a meter or more in diameter).
    • The cookbook's recipe also completely messes up the correct way to cook with Pixian doubanjiang (Pixian chili bean paste, a major component of this and many other Sichuan dishes), giving instructions that would scorch the paste.
  • Another common target is Chinese chili oils. While Sichuan cuisine goes for chili oil pretty hard, many other provinces have their own versions, like Guizhou's youlajiao. Moreover, within Sichuan, there's plenty of different kinds of chili oil as well; the most prominent Sichuan oils are hongyou (literally "red oil") and youlazi (literally "spicy things in oil"), but ther forms exist. Non-Chinese sources often seem to think that only Sichuan-style chili oils exist, and among Sichuan oils, they don't distinguish between types. Even recipes purporting to make a non-Sichuan oil, like the innumerable recipes for homemade versions of Lao Gan Ma (a brand of mass-produced Guizhou youlajiao), use a Sichuan technique (which calls for hot oil to be poured over the chilis and allowed to steep) even when the other main Chinese chili-oil process (which calls for the chilis to be added to a pan of hot oil on the stove and allowed to cook together for a few minutes) is actually called for.
  • Western food writers often comment on how stoves in China are more powerful than exist in the West, especially North America, and from this conclude that jet-engine-like stoves are needed to get the proper seared flavor in Chinese stir-fries. In reality, North American stoves are just fine for the purpose with any halfway decent wok—it's just that the recipes these writers concoct call for amounts of food that crowd the wok, or techniques that muff up the doneness of the dish.
  • Western recipes using tofu frequently call for pressing the tofu before cooking, even when the tofu is firm tofu. Firm tofu has already been pressed basically by definition, so pressing it further is just going to get you rubbery tofu. Supposedly, the extra-pressed tofu is supposed to mimic meat, but there are many meat substitutes that work better than tofu for that (chief among them being wheat gluten, aka seitan). Chinese and other Asian tofu recipes basically never call for pressing tofu; while there are some tofu products that go for that extra-firm, rubbery texture on purpose, these products are niche and are also generally made professionally rather than by pressing firm tofu at home.

Geography

• 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.

History

• 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).
• People sometimes think that the RMS Titanic crashed into the iceberg on purpose, as they thought that the ship would just plow through the iceberg unharmed. This is likely due to the whole disaster being cited as an example the dangers of "arrogance of man" and the like. In reality, while the Titanic was claimed to be unsinkable (no doubt reinforcing the misconception), they most definitely did not ram the iceberg on purpose.
• It's often assumed that people tried for heresy or witchcraft basically had no chance of being acquitted and were all but certain to be tortured and killed. This wasn't necessarily true, in fact, the Spanish Inquisition actually did acquit a fair amount of people being tried, especially if their accuser had an obvious motive for wanting them out of the picture.
• Cavemen are often thought (and depicted in fiction) as being really dumb, and talking in Hulk Speak. Cavemen living 10,000 years ago were genetically barely any different than modern-day humans, and thus were likely no less intelligent, on average.

Internet Culture

• According to a local Russian newspaper, Cosplay is a Japanese fashion style defined by padded shoulders and tight sleeves, rather than the act of wearing a costume in order to look exactly like a specific character.
• 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 comparing a person to 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 child predators than it ever did to aid them.
• 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.
• 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 by members of 4chan's /b/ board as a protest in response to rumours that mods on an online game were being discriminatory. The meme image consists of a black man sporting an afro, wearing a suit, and the words "Pool's Closed" underneath him. In true /b/ fashion, they soon took the fight to the offline world, putting up the signs at actual swimming pools. And naturally, lacking the specific context, it was mistaken for racism. The meme is actually anti-racist, but you wouldn't know that if you didn't know the specific game or situation it referenced. Objectively, it's really an ambiguous image that could mean any number of things. But to Mary Altorfer — a white grandmother of mixed-race children, who knew nothing about the anti-racist sarcastic movement it represented — it meant no black kids were allowed in the pool.^note Segregated swimming pools are a real and often overlooked part of America's history of racism, and this lady was old enough to remember the white security guards who would beat any black person who tried to come in. It was an honest mistake.
• Pretty much every newspaper in the UK believes that an "internet troll" is someone who sends death threats to people, releases their private details to the public, and is generally hellbent on literally ruining peoples' lives. To be fair, there certainly are self-described 'trolls' who do cruel, destructive things online: more generally, trolls are people who post annoying or stupid things to get rises out of people, which, depending on how extreme it is and how another party may perceive it, makes it easy to deduce that trolls are just unpleasant cyber-bullies or foul-mouthed degenerates. There is a measure of truth to the otherwise simplistic idea that "X Person's Life was Ruined By Internet Trolls." (Consider Weev, for God's sake); that said, the UK media are still behind the times when it comes to internet culture.

• This CNN article about crossplaying in cosplay. In cosplay circles, "crossplay" means dressing as a character who's the opposite sex to you.^note Not to be confused with crossdressing; for example a male cosplayer dressed as Astolfo from Fate/Apocrypha would be crossdressing but not crossplaying, since even though he's wearing girl's clothes, he's dressed as a male character (and conversely a female cosplayer would be crossplaying but not crossdressing). The article uses it to refer to genderbent versions of characters (also quite common but generally treated in the same category as reimagined cosplays^note e.g. Steampunk versions of well known characters). While that could be a simple mistake, the fact that the article actually quotes "an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University" who gives the correct definition several times makes it quite astounding. Trying to portray female cosplayers as engaging in some form of empowerment (and dismissing "serious" male crossplayers^note While the likes of "Sailor Bubbah" are quite well known, there are a lot of male crossplayers who make an effort to portray female characters (and succeed; they're just much harder to notice)) doesn't help. It also repeats the common misconception that cosplay is Japanese in origin.^note The word 'cosplay' is, but it was coined in the 80s to describe what had been done at various American/European sci-fi conventions for many decades.
• The website for the upcoming water park, Columbia Pictures Aquaverse uses a picture of Tank from Surf's Up with the info from a completely different character from that film, Big Z.

Law

• Opponents of legalizing prostitution often claim it's rape since prostitutes can't refuse customers. This is completely false: In countries with legal, regulated prostitution at least, the prostitutes are able to refuse service just like any other business.
• It's often incorrectly thought that US law says that if someone is sentenced to death and survives, they must be set free. While medieval courts and the like sometimes did work this way (typically under the reasoning that they must have survived due to divine intervention, and thus God doesn't want them to be executed,) it's certainly not the case in the US. A part of this may be due to a misunderstanding of how double jeopardy works (which says a person can't be tried twice for the same crime, but if they are being executed they have already been tried and found guilty.)
  • Speaking of Double Jeopardy, it is specifically to prevent repeated trials for the exact same crime (such as a fascist government trying to get rid of declared enemies of the state with mock trials, doing so as many times as it takes to secure a conviction), not a license to commit that same crime again in perpetuity without consequence. If you are acquited of murder, but you're actually guilty, and new evidence is discovered, a mistrial can be declared in light of the new evidence, and in so doing it is considered the same trial, not a new one. The same goes if you were convicted, but are actually innocent. For that matter, if you are convicted of murdering someone who faked their death, you cannot later kill them again with impunity, as this would be considered a different crime.

Maths & Statistics

• "63% of people in Lambeth support a ban on legal highs". As Brixton Buzz points out in the linked article, what Lambeth Council carefully omit to mention is that it's 63% of those who felt strongly enough about the issue to respond to the consultation — a mere 107 people, 0.03% of the population as a whole.
• One question which you can ask Alexa (Amazon's voice AI) is "what is zero divided by zero?". Unfortunately, she gives the wrong answer; she claims it to be "undefined", but it's actually indeterminate — if it were undefined, a *lot* of higher mathematics wouldn't work.^note The equation "x=y/0" is equivalent to "y=0*x", so if you're solving it for x, it is undefined (no answer will work) for any non-zero value of y — but if y is also 0, it is indeterminate (choose any answer you care to name, it will work). For the purpose of defining 0^0, it is usually taken to be 1, as this is the value which makes infinite polynomials work.

Medicine

• Vertigo (phantom motion sickness or difficulty in keeping balance) is often misused to mean acrophobia (fear of heights or of falling). This is perhaps understandable, since vertigo can result in acrophobia. Also, people who confuse the two may be associating them as Alfred Hitchcock did.

Military & Weapons

• Firearms in news articles. Any black, vaguely military-styled rifle will invariably be described as a "machine gun", 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^note The killers committed their crimes at a range of around 50-100 yards, longer than most murders by gunshot, certainly longer than practical with a handgun, but far shorter than a professional sniper. This is often parodied◊ by gun enthusiasts.
  • One of the most common errors made in the media is the assumption that "semi-automatic" means more or less the same thing as "fully automatic", when all that it means is that you can fire it more than once without having to work a slide, lever, or bolt to chamber another cartridge, but still have to pull the trigger once per bullet. Also there is an assumption that automatic weapon fire is the same thing as a water hose, only with bullets; that a gunman can stand in one place and spray an entire crowd with bullets, killing fifty to a hundred people in thirty seconds. It actually doesn't take more than about six seconds to empty a fully automatic rifle, and while you can do some damage with one, you still have to have good aim.
  • For many years, mostly in Europe and the UK, the term "revolver" was a generic term for "pistol." This originated in the period when the vast majority of pistols in use were revolvers, but became more problematic with the invention of semi-automatic and automatic pistols. This phraseology still turns up in historical works and journalism from time to time, where clearly semi-automatic, clip-fed pistols are often identified as "revolvers" to the confusion and consternation of gun buffs.^note Especially in the US, where the ATF and other law enforcement agencies specifically define a pistol as any handgun without a revolving cylinder.
  • 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 M16", 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 MP5: "the terrorists used Koch MP5 and Heckler submachine guns".
  • A frequent error in media reports is the general confusion regarding round designations; most rounds are named based on their diameter, measured in either millimeters (5.56mm, 9mm, 10mm, etc.) or in inches (.45 caliber, .50 caliber, .38 caliber, etc.). News stories like to put zero thought into this (or what the "mm" part actually means) by either tacking a decimal in front of a number that shouldn't have it, making the round sound comically small (.9mm, which is about 1/28th of an inch in diameter) or turning caliber to millimeter, making the round sound cartoonishly large (223mm, which is almost nine inches in diameter. For reference, U.S. Navy heavy cruisers of WWII were typically armed with eight inch guns). The .12 gauge shotgun is another laughable designation, as the projectile would weigh over eight pounds! (For reference, "eight pounders" were medium field artillery during the Napoleonic Wars. They weighed about half a ton, and were served by a sixteen-man crew and several horses.) A running joke on gun forums is that news stories often cover shootings that involve the elusive, super deadly .9mm round that no one can seem to find in stores.
  • 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. Of particular note was Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy's wish to ban barrel shrouds. She was asked by a TV reporter what a barrel shroud even was, and she stumbled for an answer, suggesting that it's a part that changes a simple rifle to a military-level assault rifle, before finally suggesting "I think it's the shoulder thing that goes up." A barrel shroud is actually just a piece of metal or wood that protects the holder from the barrel's heat after being fired.
    • "The shoulder thing that goes up" has gone on to be a very popular humor line among gun bloggers, as no one has the faintest idea what it would be, barring maybe the Predator's shoulder cannon.
    • By the way, the term "assault weapon" is also heavily mocked by gun aficionados. There are "assault guns", which are a special sub-type of self-propelled artillery, and there are "assault rifles", defined as fully automatic shoulder weapons that fire cartridges more powerful that pistol rounds, but less powerful than ordinary deer rifle rounds. "Assault weapon" has no formal definition, but de facto means "something the speaker is particularly frightened by, or wishes the listener(s) to be particularly frightened of." This lack of definition made it ludicrously easy to get around attempts to ban "assault weapons", as it forced the laws against them to define them in terms of features such as muzzle breaks or bayonet mounts. Removing or modifying some of the features meant that they shot the same ammunition at the same velocity with the same ease of firing at the same rate, but were no longer "assault weapons" according to the laws.
• A common mistake when papers report on naval combat is to use the word "battleship" interchangeably with the word "warship". There is not a single battleship in service in any navy in the world. To clarify: A Battleship is a specific type of heavily armed and armored surface warship, traditionally armed with the biggest artillery available (although some of the later battleships were also refitted to carry batteries of anti-ship missiles). That said, one can probably guess why "battleship" is the term that the general public hears far more often...
  • The Americans still have a couple of Iowa-class battleships in the mothball fleet, but that's really splitting hairs. The biggest ships in most navies are destroyers.
  • Infamously, during the Cold War, a difference in naval terminology between the US and the Soviets, confusion on the part of laymen, and good old-fashioned political muckracking all lead to the perceived issue of the Cruiser Gap, with the Soviets having substantially more cruisers in their Navy than the US did (the US limited "Cruiser" to large surface warships armed primarily with guns, while a similarly-sized warship armed primarily with missiles was termed a "Frigate"). The solution was to reclassify all of the large Missile Frigates as Missile Cruisers, along with various other redesignations to bring the US Navy in line with the other NATO navies.
    • Of course, a modern "destroyer" is often larger than a World War II-era "cruiser", and for all intents and purposes serves the same function as one. Confused yet? It doesn't help that naval terminology has changed over the years. While destroyers were originally light escorts and skirmishers, they are now the primary all-purpose surface combatant in naval warfare.
• 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". Anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of firearms can tell you that "Glock" is the only word in that blurb that isn't an absurd and egregious mistake, to the point that the comments are split on whether or not it's a deliberate attempt to troll (firearms are a tough subject to satirize because no matter how over-the-top crazy you try to be in service to humor, someone else has said something far more ridiculous in complete and total sincerity).
  • In a similar way, one Russian journalist once described a 9x18 Makarov caliber brass casing as a "Bullet from a Makarov Nagant". One has to wonder how that happened, seeing how the Makarov is a semi-auto handgun and the Nagant name is attached to a service rifle, a revolver, and a line of automobiles; all four of which are easy to tell apart at a glance.
• Bit of a double research failure—legal definitions and video game technology: Sen. Joe Lieberman was upset by the presence of a Super Scope at the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs regarding video game violence and the eventual formation of the ESRB, saying that it "looks like an assault weapon." For starters, the Super Scope is more accurately held like a bazooka or similar over-shoulder rocket-firing device. His assertion that it looks like an assault weapon is questionable at best for other reasons, including its incongruously small size, obviously marked and lens-sealed front bore, and perhaps most damningly, a lack of anything resembling any of the defining assault weapon features prohibited by the Federal Assault Weapons Ban (ie., removable magazines, retractable stock, pistol grip, bayonet mount, flash suppressor, grenade launcher mount).
• Media frequently use the term 'shrapnel' to refer to shards of metal produced by any explosion, when the proper term is 'fragments'. Shrapnel only refers to the metal balls released by a shrapnel shell.
  • They also use 'detonation' to refer to any substance exploding while many explosives, such as black powder, deflagrate instead (deflagration is subsonic combustion through heat transfer, detonation is supersonic with a shockwave).
• People often think of tanks as slow. Which is true... if you're talking about the original World War I tanks. More recent tanks, even as early as the M18 Hellcat from World War II, can move up to 60-70 miles per hour.

People — Groups

• The Furry Fandom is subject to a lot of misconception, generally along the lines that all 'furries' have a fetish involving dressing up in mascot-style costumes; for clarification, see that trope entry.
  • 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: the Hartford Advocate 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).
    • Though Ms. Abel did confuse transvestites and transsexuals... especially since she brought the "trapped in an X's body" bit into it.
  • On the subject of furries, there was a news article that 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) or at a stretch to the phylum of invertebrate animals known as arthropods (literally, "jointed legs") that includes insects, spiders, and lobsters. (In case it needs to be said, the attendees of Anthrocon were not all insect/spider/crustacean/etc. furries, though statistically a few probably were.)
  • 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.
  • The idea that all Furries are perverts that are into sexualizing animals is the biggest misconception. While there are those into that, and they are highly visible on the internet, they are a minority and most furries are not into animals that way. Most people who consider themselves "Furries" are just regular people who like fantasy animals. The exact definition of "Furry" is very nebulous and usually considered subject to a individual's choice whether they consider themselves that or not, but at its most inclusive, the definition is anybody that likes sapient animals, and going by that, it makes most people Furries as most people have at least some Works with Talking Animals in it that they enjoy.
• The confusion between yankii, bosozoku/hashiriya, other assorted Japanese Delinquents, and actual Yakuza is a big one. Often, they are all piled in as organized and dangerous criminals, when high-ranking yakuza and "the unaffiliated gangs", are the only truly organized criminals of the bunch, and the only ones devoted to major crimes such as human trafficking, large scale drug smuggling, planned murder for hire, major financial fraud, and the like. There are some low-level Yakuza that interact with and mingle amongst the other groups mentioned here, which are generally called the insulting term "chinpira", and whose business generally consists of being middlemen for smaller-time drug dealers and trying to find actually "promising" criminal talent among younger delinquents.
  • Yankii are best compared to your country's variant of the Lower-Class Lout. Most aren't yakuza (though some chinpira are yankii or ex-yankii, and far more yankii, just as any other Lower-Class Lout, ape yakuza because Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster!). They're petty delinquent types, troublemakers, but their fighting and violence tends to be impulsive such as the Bar Brawl or lashing out at someone who just "dissed" them as opposed to organized hits (unless you've managed to piss off an entire group, or they have a chinpira friend and you really pissed them off), it tends to be less lethal than yakuza violence (because they don't have guns generally), and most nonviolent crime they get involved in tends to be of the petty sort - drug use and low-level dealing on occasion, disturbing the peace, shoplifting, occasional petty scams aimed at individuals or business or the benefits system, and other similarly impulsive petty (and often stupid) crime.
  • Bōsōzoku and hashiriya are the same as above, except their cultures are around motorcycles and car racing respectively. Again, some low-level yakuza may intermingle, but most bosozoku and hashiriya are not hardcore yakuza any more than every biker is a Hell's Angel or every street racer is someone in The Mafia. Most of the same impulsive, petty crime as for yankii, except with the occasional addition of offenses connected to driving such as DUI, illegal street racing, or motorcycle noise violations.
  • The "unaffiliated gangs" are Japanese Gangbangers. They may include bosozoku or yankii or whatnot (because they are more open to anyone joining up than the Yakuza is, hence they are also more racially diverse) and they tend to be more dangerous and violent than most Yakuza, and inclined toward yakuza-style crime (e.g. more planned felonies, less petty stupid crime), and occasionally armed as well as or better than yakuza.
• 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.
  • These days goth is often conflated with Emo, not helped by the use of "goffik" to describe it in My Immortal.
• Likewise, the hippie culture that emerged in the 1960s is often described as a "movement." In reality, it was little more than a cultural wave based around music, fashion, and yes, psychedelic drug use. Contemporary media since the late 1970s has tended to conflate hippies with the militant far-left Yippies and Liberation Armies of the same era.
• In 1992, the New York Times published a list of "grunge slang", all of which was entirely made up by Megan Jasper, the receptionist at Sub Pop Records who was getting sick and tired of media outlets calling for general information about "grunge".
• 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.
• Since the 1920s — in other words, for as long as fascism has existed — otherwise intelligent commentators (including early on, and most famously, no less a personage than Ho Chi Minh) have referred to the Ku Klux Klan as a fascist organization. Their reasoning is that, like the Nazis^note They formed in early 1920, but did not come to power until 1933, however nationalism and racism had already been conflated in the public mind , the Klan are nationalistic and racist. Not only was fascism originally not racist (Benito Mussolini started the movement in the early '20s and didn't adopt racism until the late 1930s), but the fascist ideal is grounded in the totalitarian state, which members of the KKK have never supported. Indeed, they formed as an anti-government terrorist group opposing Reconstruction (nearly half a century before the word fascism was even coined, no less), and often operated out of Baptist churches, who were at the time conspicuously non-hierarchical and strongly in favor of the separation of church and state, both of which are completely anathema to fascism. This is not to say that the Klan were good people, but that to call them fascists is unfair: one can be nationalistic and (to some degree, at least) racist and still believe in democratic values. As a matter of fact, the Nazis mentioned the KKK, unfavorably, in their anti-American propaganda^note The Nazis viewed the KKK as outdated, impractical, and not willing to go far enough in pursuit of what they wanted. But commentators have seen Klansmen alongside neo-Nazis at "white-power" rallies and assumed the two groups were basically interchangeable.
• One newspaper journalist noted the fact that the British National Party (an extreme right-wing organisation) had few or no Scottish members, and jumped to the conclusion "therefore there is very little racism in Scotland". As anyone knows who has spent very much time on Usenet or on web forums, Scottish racists consider themselves to be non-British, so of course they are not going to join or support any organisation with "British" right there in the name.
• The whole concept of sociopaths being immune to fear is exaggerated a lot in fiction. In reality, they usually feel less fear than normal people and thus weigh chances more dispassionately. For example: most people would, if told some act had a 1 percent chance of being fatal, only do it if they were truly desperate or the reward was truly staggering, whereas a sociopath would probably think "I'll survive 99 percent of the time, why not?" That said, if the odds are high enough (such as something being fatal 95 percent of the time) most sociopaths will Know When to Fold 'Em and not attempt it.

People — Specific

• Yahoo! News published an otherwise accurate article about tennis player Anna Kournikova and singer Enrique Iglesias having twins, but accompanied the text with a photo of actress Anna Kendrick , who has no connection to either party ^note  the text consistently got Anna Kournikova's name right, so presumably they just picked the wrong "Anna K" out of their photo database. Anna Kendrick had a sense of humor about it: "Dear Yahoo: how do I get to this timeline where I've slept with Enrique Iqlesias please and thank you."
• For reasons known only to themselves, the publishers of British Airways' in-flight magazine stated Lupita Nyong'o isn't from Mexico City, but from Wakanda — Black Panther's (fictional) home country.
• An Olympic Games commentator referred to London mayor (and future British Prime Minister) 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...
• 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.
• 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.
• 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"^note Even though the percentage of patients who die waiting for treatment is lower in the UK than the US and where Stephen Hawking would most certainly be dead if he were British. Um... Stephen Hawking was British. And still very much alive at the time (he eventually reached the age of 76).
  • Even better, Hawking personally wrote to the publishers, reminding them that he was British and stating that he owed his life to the structure and help of the NHS.
  • Hawking didn't get special treatment for being a rich and famous scientist, either. His condition and treatment started when he was an ordinary physics grad student.
  • Britons also don't have to wait six months to see a dentist (the British Teeth phenomenon is not only wildly exaggerated, but more an example of Values Dissonance about cosmetic dentistry than anything). They have a dental check every six months (or should do); treatment for problems... varies, but is at least intended to be within a few days.
• 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.
• In Stephen King's On Writing, he compares Carrie White to the Columbine shooters, based on the popular belief at the time that the shooters were unpopular bullying victims. In fact, Harris and Klebold had a healthy social circle and their motives had little to do with bullying, and in fact they were reported to have been bullies themselves.
• 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. ^note  For what it's worth, he did spearhead the bill that opened ARPANet (the electronic communication apparatus that would become the Internet) up to civilian use. So Gore's original statement was technically correct, if a bit exaggerated and poorly-phrased.
• 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.
• 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.
• A reporter working on a piece about "journalists in the elite media who socialize with elected officials" tried to imply that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Connie Schultz appeared to be overly friendly with U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, based on a photo of them hugging, apparently not aware that Schultz is married to Sen. Brown. Ooops.
  • A Canadian cub reporter was once excitedly following a story that the leader of the New Democratic Party was canoodling with a member of his delegation to an environmental conference. A senior reporter had to gently explain that the "staffer" was his wife (and a fellow Member of Parliament).
• Countless Moral Guardians have gotten on Larry the Cable Guy's case for his "Git-r-done" catch phrase, perceiving it as sexual — while Larry's humor can be crude at times, he has always made it clear that "Git-r-done" just means "just do it".
• A cosplayer of Eridan Ampora from Homestuck got referred to as Eridan Holmstuck◊ by one newspaper.
• Evangelical Christians will always insist that the "Jefferson Bible", Thomas Jefferson's personal scrapbook filled with selected quotes of Jesus Christ, is evidence enough that one of America's Founding Fathers was a Christian. Dead wrong. History books without the slightest sense of bias will tell you that Jefferson was an agnostic, if not an outright atheist. Sure, Jefferson admired Jesus for his compassionate nature, but didn't believe he was Godly. In fact, the Jefferson Bible contains no passages about Jesus' miracles or any mention of his divine nature.
• This tweet, claiming the writer was "moving to Australia, because their president is a Christian and actually supports what he says", went viral during Obama's re-election campaign. Not a single thing tweeted is correct; Australia has a Prime Minister. The prime minister at the time was Australia's first female Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Although Gillard was raised in an Baptist family, she is a noted atheist. She was (and at time of writing still is) living with her partner - unmarried. Gillard was famous for back flipping on many issues.
• Another example from the French-speaking world: Les Grosses Têtes, a culture-oriented radio show. They invited Victor-André Masséna and started to talk about his Famous Ancestor... with one of the hosts asking how the ancestor in question had felt about not being a Marshal of the Empire. Right after they had deplored that the general public was ignorant and full of misconceptions about the Napoleonic era.
• Many websites, including said person's Wikipedia and Disney wiki page, listed voice actor Will Ryan's birthday as November 13, 1949. According to an obituary by his talent agency, his birthday is actually May 21, 1949.
• Dorothy Baguley is often misidentified as former supercentenarian claimant Lucy Hannah, likely due to two of her descendants being called Lucy and Hannah.

Physics

• Like the examples below, Astronomy is quite often hit hard when mass media publish news related to it. Errors include, but not are limited to:
  • Confusing units, up to mistaking light-years for kilometers and this without including to bother to check if a "billion" is short-scale (10⁹) or long-scale (10¹²).
  • To happily talk about habitable planet(s)^note Or a new planet in the Solar System having been discovered, when we only know there's a world orbiting a star in a location where temperatures are more or less Earth-like^note And in the case of that "new planet", it's an entirely hypothetical object.
  • Many journalists reporting on space subjects seem to like the word "intergalactic" even when reporting on a lunar eclipse or the International Space Station.
• Many YouTube videos debunking the idea of the Perpetual Motion Machine attract the usual cranks who simply refuse to believe that the Laws of Thermodynamics are valid (despite us having roughly a thousand years of empirical experience validating them before they were finally proved), or raising red herrings such as bearing friction or air drag, or (mind-bogglingly) "turning the wheel the wrong way", whichever way that is supposed to be. As Donald Simanek points out on his web site (linked from the PMM article), the reasons why PMMs don't work are seldom only the Laws of Thermodynamics, and never just friction or air drag. Even if a PMM were built with perfectly frictionless bearings and run in a perfect vacuum, it still wouldn't work. As for "which way an overbalanced wheel is supposed to turn", even PMM believers disagree; some claim that the wheel is supposed to be dragged down on the side which is heavier, others that this is supposed to happen on the other side, which has greater lever arm. The reality, of course, is that these effects cancel each other out.

Pinball

• There is no denying that Baffle Ball is an important hallmark game in pinball history — its success turned into a nationwide craze, single-handedly jump-starting the nation's interest in "pin games". However, when the history of pinball is recounted in mainstream outlets, Baffle Ball is frequently misidentified as the first pinball game ever.
• Stern Electronics' last pinball game, Orbitor 1, is notable for being set on a bowled transparent playfield, resulting in a game where pinballs spin and curve around the various obstacles. The secret apparently eludes many observers, who often explain the game's effects as the result of magnetism.

Radio

• The Radio Times listing for Season 2, Episode 1 of Abled says "Matt finally meets a woman that he likes, Anna. She is a wheelchair user, so they share their annoyances and grief at people's attitude to disabilities." Matt only learns Anna sometimes needs to use a wheelchair at the very end of the episode, at which point he says exactly the wrong thing and she wheels off. This more or less becomes their relationship in future episodes, but it's not in this one.
• The Radio Times listing for the 2022 repeat of Now the Twelfth Night Show says "Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis offer a unique take on Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night using archived extracts from various stage, TV and radio versions of the play". Now maybe they're deadpan going along with the joke, but it certainly reads as though they believe the BBC schools production where Barbara Windsor played Maria as Peggy Mitchell, the spoof police documentary about Malvolio getting arrested, the stage production where a method actor actually did get paralytically drunk to play Sir Toby, and the cheesy American musical The Chick Wears Pants! are all genuine archive recordings.

Sport

• 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. The UFC even puts on a reality show called The Ultimate Fighter. Overall, the UFC 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 have embraced 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.
• 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.
• 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!^note One gets the sense that they were talking about the ballpark—which was relatively new (it had opened in 2001) and was considered nice—but they clearly flubbed it.
• When Brett Favre was traded from the Green Bay Packers to the New York Jets, practically every media report made a comment about Favre "wearing a different shade of green". The Packers and Jets use the exact same shade of green (Pantone 5535).
• Auto racing series are frequently jumbled up by the mass media and in-particular by picture editors who often will place a large picture of a car from a completely different series in an article. Indycar is probably the most ill-served as the cars are often labelled as Formula One cars and the Indianapolis 500 is called a NASCAR race. And some media outlets continued to refer to IndyCar under the name of the previous CART sanctioning body, even more than 3 years after its demise. Other examples include labelling junior formulae cars as "Formula One", rallies as "Rally cross", Automobile Racing Club of America (ARCA) stock cars as NASCAR (the two series are affiliated but are still separate entities), mixing up IHRA and NHRA drag racing, assuming any off road trophy truck race is the Baja 1000, calling MotoGP "Superbikes" and vice-versa, and so forth...
• Mashable's article on the All Blacks Sevens team's performance of the haka seems to have confused the team with the All Blacks proper. The latter play the full, 15-man game of Rugby Union, whereas the former plays the Sevens game, a shortened version with seven players on each side. The article introduced the Sevens team as "New Zealand's national rugby team, the All Blacks" (technically true but more accurate for the 15 man team) then went on to explain that they usually perform the haka before every match, which is the 15 man team's tradition. The Sevens team only do the haka when they win a tournament - there's no point spending five minutes on the haka for each of the five or six 15 minute games they play over a weekend. In addition, the writer states the haka is a "dance" performed for "intimidation" - both something of a Fandom-Enraging Misconception to some All Blacks fans.
  • The common perception outside Australia is that Australian Rules Football is a form of rugby. Actually, rugby wasn't formally introduced to Australia until several years after Aussie rules was invented.^note The main inventor of Aussie rules, Tom Wills, was very familiar with rugby, having attended Rugby School in England. But in codifying Aussie rules, he deliberately tried to make the game different from rugby Since Aussie rules and rugby have a strong Fandom Rivalry in Australia, this mistake can be a Berserk Button for some people.
• The Sky Sports Football^note soccer to the Americans reading Yearbook has a quote on the back saying that it "stands for authority and integrity". So why their "Cups and Ups and Downs Diary" in the 2014/15 edition stated that Germany beat the Netherlands (instead of Argentina - the team that knocked the Netherlands out of the World Cup) in the 2014 FIFA World Cup final is anybody's guess.
• An “Ultimate Guide” to the English Premier League states that every team to have played in the Premier League has been relegated at least once from it. This ignores the six teams to have featured in every season^note Arsenal, Chelsea, Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur and the at-the-time-of-publishing three teams who had never been relegated since their promotion to it^note Brighton and Hove Albion and the since-relegated AFC Bournemouth and Huddersfield Town. Even if this extended to include the First Division^note its name between 1892 and 1992, it still isn’t true since AFC Bournemouth had never been in the top flight before their promotion in 2015.
• An official guide to the London 2012 Olympics included a list of countries that had never won a gold medal. This list was apparently compiled by them going through the previous Summer Olympics and removing those countries that had won a gold medal, as the list didn’t include any country that had yet to win a medal of any colour.
• A special magazine printed in 2012 to mark the Premier League’s 20th anniversary included a list of, in their opinion, the 10 most shocking moments of it. One of these was when Bolton Wanderers’ midfielder Fabrice Muamba collapsed on the pitch in a game against Tottenham Hotspur in 2012. Whilst it was shocking, it was in an FA Cup match, not a Premier League one.
• Although it would be caught and corrected, the official sticker album for the 2018 World Cup printed Roberto Firmino’s club as being “Liverpool FC (BRA)”, incorrectly calling them a Brazilian club instead of English.

Theatre

• Zazzerino, a German-language site intended as a guide to operas, operettas, and musicals, can be pretty inaccurate when it comes to plot summaries:
  • The plot summary of The Snow Maiden:
    • It states that The Good King Berendey is able to make peace between the Snow Maiden and Kupava, and that later Kupava leaves her ex-bridegroom Mizgir alone with the Snow Maiden to help the latter find love. It's not even close to the truth: the Snow Maiden and Kupava's friendship is never repaired, and Kupava has (and wants) nothing whatsoever to do with Mizgir after he renounces her, again, at Berendey's court. Mizgir ends up alone with the Snow Maiden because she wanders off alone in the woods and he pursues her.
    • It's said that Berendey tells Lel to choose a bride among the maidens present at the celebration. It's not true: Berendey tells him to kiss a girl he likes best, and while Lel does pick Kupava, the very girl whom he ends up marrying, the kiss isn't treated as any kind of engagement or wedding ritual by anyone, and Lel and Kupava declare their love unambiguously and decide to get married much later.
  • The plot summary of The Tsars Bride:
    • It's said that Lyubasha was brought from Cashmere. She wasn't: the opritschniks captured her in Kashira, which, although not precisely in the vicinity (more than 200 km away from Alexandrov where the opera is set), is a Russian town that was quite within the opritschniks' reach.
    • Bomelius is called "the old man" (in the obvious context of Dirty Old Man) in the summary. However, his age is never stated in the opera (although he's fit enough physically to run after Lyubasha), and the real-life Bomelius was thirty-one at most in 1571 when the opera is set (and never lived to see old age at all, since he was executed in 1579).

Theme Parks

• On Apple Music's Disneyland playlist, one of the songs is "One Little Spark" from the original version of Journey into Imagination, a ride which is from Disney World, not Disneyland. Funnily enough, a clone of said ride was planned for the park's second gate in the 90's, but those plans were scrapped.

Toys

• American Girl has multiple ones, in some cases with too many examples to link to individual articles.
  • The claim that the modern dolls launched in the 1990s were custom-ordered or personalized to look like the recipients. American Girl didn't offer custom-design dolls until 2017 and the "modern" dolls that are claimed to be customized are from a set pool of options which aren't modified from however they're designed at release. There's often more options for white female children—the first twenty dolls were mostly light-skinned with the same face mold—so recipients who matched those looks or were given dolls to look like them may think they were customized. Or mistake them for another then-available brand, MyTwinn.
  • Any clickbait article that claims that American Girl dolls are worth hundreds or thousands of dollars on the secondary market. The articles will often link to eBay auctions that are listed for high prices for dolls and/or collection items. What's not said is how these auctions almost always end without a single bid or purchase. The majority of collectors searching on the secondary market don't want to and/or outright refuse to pay high prices for secondary clothes or much more than $150-200 for a new in box doll (and that's for unique dolls that are harder to find such as Cécile or Kanani; even they can be found at sensible prices with patience or through direct sales among collectors, especially as children who had them age up and sell off old collections). No one sensible is paying $2000 for a incomplete used Samantha doll in messy clothes missing her shoes and stockings.
  • This article about Lila states that "Josefine Montoya [...] struggles with the recent loss of her mother after the Mexican-American war." The Mexican–American War was from from 1846 to 1848. Josefina's series is set in the 1820s.
  • In an article by Entertainment Weekly, contributor Jessica Wang erroneously lists the first three Historical Characters—Kirsten, Samantha and Molly—as from World War II. Kirsten was a Swedish immigrant from the 1850s Pioneer era, while Samantha was from the Edwardian era during the turn of the 20th century. Molly is the only one of the original bunch who actually represents that particular era. This was later corrected by removing the incorrect paragraph; the original error can be seen here.
• BIONICLE:
  • In February 2014, the platinum Mask of Light piece made news as the most expensive LEGO piece ever to be sold. Articles such as this claimed the mask belongs to a character named Avohkii — actually, Avohkii is the name of the mask itself, and its wearer is called Takanuva.
  • The nonfiction book Brick by Brick about the LEGO company has a picture of what it calls the "Kanohi Mask of Life", but it's the Pakari Nuva, worn by Onua and released five years before the design of the Mask of Life was even known to the public (and four years before it was even revealed to exist).
• DisneyStore will have merchandise or images that contradict their source material on occasion, some of which seem to be derived from cases of Covers Always Lie. One example is Moana merchandise depicting Pua the pig as traveling at sea with Moana and Maui on their first voyage, but Pua is left at home in the film; the DVD cover of the film depicts Pua traveling across the sea so this is presumably a case of marketing the characters over continuity errors.
• Similar to the Peanuts example on the Film page, some news articles claim that the 2012 Furby is the first time they have been revived since 1998, when the Furby was also brought back in 2005.
• In February of 2021, Hasbro announced that they were renaming the "Mr. Potato Head" toyline to "Potato Head", which made perfect sense since it had expanded so much from just the original character. The press release specifically stated that Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head themselves weren't going anywhere, but also touted inclusiveness and plans to introduce a non-gendered Potato family set. Naturally, media outlets ignored the first part and reported that Hasbro was stripping Mr. Potato Head of his gender, which drew a huge backlash, before Hasbro was forced to clarify things.
• Spider-Man: No Way Home had a Disney deluxe figure playset◊ made that seemed to have been arranged by someone who had a general knowledge of the Spider-Man universe and made a set with characters that are not even featured in the movie. Iron Man and Mysterio◊ are even featured as if both are in this film but without spoiling an earlier film, they aren't physically in this film in the slightest. Multiple reviewers were very willing to point out that the set has characters of previous films, and lacking characters that would make this set appropriate such as Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Sandman, The Lizard, and Electro who are major parts of this film.
• Tamagotchi: It's common for news outlets and eBay listings to refer to Tamagotchi as a "giga pet" instead of "virtual pet". Giga Pets are a specific type of virtual pet made by Tiger Electronics that are unrelated to Tamagotchis other than using the same concept. It was also fairly common, before Tamagotchi was overtaken by some of its more popular competitors, for said competitors to be called "Tamagotchis" in the media.
• This article about Teddy Ruxpin calls Grubby a bear. Grubby is actually a worm-like creature called an Octopede.

Sources

• 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.
• 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, newspapers 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." The ending line destroys the idea that Catholics were wholly responsible.
• Ambition has a moment of this in episode 8, where a character states "facts are the enemy of truth", then quizzes you on the quote's source, mocking you if you don't pick Cervantes. Problem is, the quote is really from Dale Wasserman...
  • Also, in Sir Basil Pike Public School, Ted tells his class that they'll learn about compound fractions... but the fractions shown are the board are improper.
• In May 2015, when the newly elected SNP MPs arrived in Westminster, The Times newspaper's political roundup included excerpts from Mhairi Black MP's diary on the BBC Scotland website. Except Black's account of being the youngest MP since 1667 is actually in The Sunday Herald. What The Times was quoting was the spoof webite "BBC Scotlandshire", which had a "diary" written in an appalling Funetik Aksent, in which she tried to use her Glasgow Underground card on the Tube, blew spitballs at the Conservatives, sold her Parliamentary iPad because it "disnae huv a Cybernat mode" and, in the bit they quoted, complained other MPs were taller than her. BBC Scotlandshire was quick to respond.

Parodies

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• The Onion has been mistaken for a legit news source so many times it's not even funny anymore.
  • Literally Unbelievable showcased this, as well as the subreddit r/AteTheOnion
  • Its transatlantic cousin, Private Eye, which pre-dates it by a number of decades, has an equally long history of this. A highlight was a joke article (you could tell it was a joke article because it was in the traditional joke section surrounded by other joke articles) spoofing The Daily Express's tendency to run spurious Diana stories: DIANA WAS STILL ALIVE HOURS BEFORE SHE DIED!" This promptly ended up on Facebook and 4chan as an example of "The most retarded headline ever". The Eye had a field day:
    Private Eye: To borrow the sentiments of many of the learned interneters: AHAHAHAHAHA...JUST LOL!
  • And then there is the Onion's military cousin, The Duffel Blog, playing off of the fact that life in the military can sometimes seem genuinely absurd and arbitrary even to those who understand it.
  • Probably the closest British website equivalent to The Onion is The Daily Mash. One hapless editor of the Harry Potter Wiki once claimed that the entire action of all seven books was just in Harry's head — and cited a Daily Mash article as "proof". He refused to believe that the Mash is a satirical site, whose articles are not intended to be taken seriously, even when pointed to their FAQ page which explicitly says so.
  • It also had happened with the Mexican website El Deforma. Sometimes said site has to acknowledge that, for the sake of comedy. But also it tends to happen that something that one of their news become truth in just mere hours (as surrealistic Mexico is).
• Mark Prindle sometimes deliberately put incorrect information in his music review pages for the sake of humor (and/or trolling the reader): The introduction to his Public Image Ltd. reviews opens with him claiming John Lydon got his start in The Clash, then stating his previous group was The Ramones within the same sentence - a couple of commenters did in fact angrily write in to correct him ^note his website also contains extensive reviews of The Sex Pistols, The Clash, and The Ramones, so obviously he'd know the difference between those three groups... but someone who'd just found this particular sub-page by looking up "Public Image Ltd reviews" on a search engine wouldn't know that.

Other

• 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.
• "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)
• European media outlets continue to refer to IndyCar under the name of a former rival sanctioning body, even more than 3 years after its decline and demise.
• 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 ^note  which in America denotes free-market liberal conservatism, which it was never supposed to mean as the Theme Park Version, at best.
  • American sources also often have trouble distinguishing between Socialism and Liberalism: although there can be a fair amount of overlap, especially since the advent of 'big-state Liberalism', they are two distinct ideologies with very different origins.
  • Another problem with this "Democrat Equals Socialist" debate is that the modern-day Democratic Party (at least since the Bill Clinton era) has taken on a "Neo-Liberal" approach, with a far more relaxed reaction to free-market capitalism than ever before. Bill even announced in 1995 that "the era of big government is over", something Republicans would have never expected a Democrat to say at the time. Likewise, Hillary Clinton was a Republican in her early political years and accepted donations from Wall Street bankers during her last Presidential run, something that Bernie Sanders (who calls himself a socialist but is more of a social democrat) chastised her for.
  • People conflate socialism with social democracy, both on the left and the right. Socialism means that the means of production be shared collectively, not that the government should take a more activist role in helping people’s day to day lives which is what it’s taken to mean. A social democracy is a capitalist economy married to a robust welfare state. There are no real socialist countries left. The closest things to it are China, Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba and even they’ve all liberalized their markets. As mentioned above, Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist despite being more of a social democrat as he doesn’t support collectivizing the means of production. However on the other side, Republicans still call Democrats socialist despite the fact that they’re the American equivalent of a social democratic party. A common complaint from them is that "socialism has failed everywhere it's been tried." But if the "socialism" category includes social democracy - and for many right-wingers, it does - then this is clearly false, because Sweden is a successful and flourishing country, as are most of its Western European peers.
• 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.
• Countless artists and illustrators get the U.S. Highway System markers (a white shield on a black square background, assigned to a set of major roads throughout the country) mixed up with the Interstate Highway System (a red-white-and-blue cutout shield of a different shape, assigned only to freeways^note there are also business routes, which most often follow normal roads and use a green version of the same shield, but these are only in certain states) mixed up, and use one's shield for the other. Others still use the older style of U.S. shield, retired in 1961, which had the name of the state at the top and was a cutout. Some even conflate the two, and put the Interstate shield's colors on a U.S. shield, typically of the pre-1961 variety. Still others will use one of the shields to designate a state highway, most of which have their own unique shapes from state to state.
  • In New York, it is especially common to mix up the U.S. highway shield with the New York State Route shield, to the point that some actual reassurance markers on roads in New York have the◊ wrong design.◊
• This article from Cracked identifies the Kid Cuisine mascot, K.C. Penguin, as a duck.
• Colour terms sometimes fall victim to this (we're not talking here about Green Is Blue or the like):
  • The Zx Spectrum manual referred to "light blue, technically known as cyan". As one commentator sarcastically pointed out, that's like saying "light green, technically known as yellow".
  • In February 2017, a newspaper word-game had the theme "green", but one of the answers was "teal". Teal is a shade of cyan, not of green. (It even looks more blue than green; it's sometimes called "petrol blue".)
• In an article about the serious incident on the Smiler roller coaster at Alton Towers in June 2015, the BBC News website claimed the Smiler to have 14 "loops". All other sources point out that the very first of its 14 inversions is a heartline roll, not a loop.
• Québécois toy store Castello makes tons of mistakes with their birthday service. Among their most egregious examples are calling Hannah Montana's nickname "Miley", making Elsa a princess (apparently forgetting about The Snow Queen) and even calling Darth Vader a good guy.
• Similar to the entry on palaeontology 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.
• In a tutorial on recording digital art, the article mixes up digital drawing and digital painting. People who make digital drawings are not digital painters, but artists. Even though they aren't the same thing, a digital drawing is created by using lines and shading, while digital painting is created without lines and colors that you see on a traditional painting. The article also misspells Corel Painter as Coral Painter.
  • Another tutorial also mixes up digital drawing and painting and defines speedpaint as making painting on a limited time, rather than a timelapse video showing the digital art process sped up. The article also calls it a drawing form, when it's not a drawing form, but form in painting.
  • Flexclip's guide on making speedpaint videos confuses speedpaint as high-speed drawing tutorials when in actuality they're timelapse videos of an artwork on a digital art software or drawn or painted traditionally.
• In an article about Momotaro, when saying that the image of the characters in various media, the writer calls video games TV games, even though they're not TV games. Video games are electronic games that are made by computer software, not on TV. However, most video games are made for consoles that connect to a TV.
• In an article about how to upload digital art and traditional art on Instagram, the article says you can edit the screen recording with iMovie, Windows Movie Maker or Adobe Premiere Pro for editing, even though Windows Movie Maker is defunct on current Windows computers. Even if the person uses an older windows computer (such as Windows 7 or older), they'll edit their screen recording in Windows Movie Maker.
• In an article about Trypophobia, the article says that term was in medical practice in 2004. Actually, the term was coined in an online forum in 2005 and gained a following on the Internet. The writers could've taken their time researching it.
• In 1994, a Canadian woman was so offended by Beavis and Butthead's repeated use of the word "slut" that, in a complaint letter, she wrote a list of epithets for comparison. The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, in their document on this complaint, dismissed any possible similarity between "slut" and the words in the list, saying that the listed words are "only applied by their users as negative sweeping racial slurs" (emphasis theirs). However, "gearbox", which is the fifth epithet in the list, is not a racial slur. It can be a sexual slur, but it can also be an anatomical term, among other things. Here are the Urban Dictionary's entries on the word.
• In late January 2023, an MSNBC segment gave incorrect definitions of various words. First, it claimed that "snowflake" means "Black person", when it actually means "an overly-sensitive person" (and one of its older meanings was actually "White person"). Second, it claimed that "SJW" stands for "stingy Jew", when it actually stands for "social justice warrior". Third, it claimed that "cuck" is a derogatory word for "men who love obese women", when it's actually short for "cuckold", which refers to "a man whose wife is sexually unfaithful". Finally, it claimed that "trap" means "hot girl I want to rape", when it's actually, as put by the Urban Dictionary, "a word popular in the anime community to describe characters who look the opposite gender".
• 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.
• an art tutorial about child proportions claims the head-to-body ratio of an average is 7.5 heads tall, Average adults are typically 7-8 heads tall with all average adults being 5 feet tall.
• When it was announced that ITV would be shuttering their children's channel CITV in 2023, there was a lot of nostaglia-fueled coverage in the British media that implied that the CITV brand name would be done away with altogether. While the CITV channel was folded into the children's section of ITV's on-demand service ITVX in September that year, the CITV brand continues to be used for a block of kids' shows on ITV2, so it hasn't disappeared entirely.
• From August 4, 2019, to March 23, 2022, the Credits Pushback page on This Very Wiki claimed that Teletoon never pushed back credits. It actually did, but not nearly to the extent that Cartoon Network does in the U.S..

For Moving

• 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).
• 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.
• 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 Europe. All that is required is that the country be a member of the European Broadcasting Union.
  • Worse, the author is an Oxford Professor. God save us...
  • Also {the idea that Eurovision is their version of American Idol makes no sense regardless since American Idol itself is derived from a British series.
• In a speech, Barack Obama got his wires crossed when discussing the budget sequesterment in February 2013 by stating that he would need to do a "Jedi mind meld" to get the cuts done. The White House did follow it up with a Funny Moment on Twitter, however.
  • It was discovered later that there really was such a thing as a Jedi Mind Meld in the Star Wars EU.
• Another one was in a review of a book called katie.com (an autobiography of a teenage girl and how she came within a hair's breadth of being abused by a predator she met online) where the reviewer raised concern about the use in the title of .com "with its association with porn sites". Just about anyone who has more than a month's internet experience knows that .com isn't a specifically pornographic domain, as .xxx is. It doesn't help that some pornsites often have the same address as reputable sites, only with a .com domain.^note Whitehouse.com is an example, the actual White House website is Whitehouse.gov
• Cirque du Soleil-related examples:
  • An article about how Mystère was a key inspiration for NiGHTS into Dreams… used a photo of the cast of another Cirque show, "O". "O" didn't even open until 1998, two years after the release of the first game!
  • An infomercial for the Peoria Civic Center in Peoria, Illinois mentioned the forthcoming visit of the tour Dralion...and used cast photos from Alegría to illustrate it.
  • Robin Leach's report on the first preview of Michael Jackson: ONE mentions that one setpiece is set to "How Does It Feel" from Stranger in Moscow. The song in question is "Stranger in Moscow" ("How does it feel" is a key refrain) from HIStory. He also mentions "I Cant [sic] Stop Loving You"; the correct title is "I Just Can't Stop Loving You". These are especially silly errors given that the piece reads like a paid advertisement for the show.
• CPU Mag in their Steam machines article, show Counter-Strike Source in a photo and call it Counter Strike Global Offense.
• Evangelical Christian preacher Josué Yrion exaggerates this on his famous sermon against videogames, with the specific intent of appearing to hate videogames so much he won't even call consoles by their proper name.
  Josué Yrion: Nintendos... Segas, Super Nintendos, PlayStations, whatever!
• This Daily Beast article on the trend of Screen-to-Stage Adaptation on Broadway and the West End in The New '10s laments the lack of originality in musical theatre these days. Unfortunately, it makes several huge errors that undercut the intended point, some of which are addressed in the comments for the article:
  • Carousel, Chicago, Mame, Oklahoma!, and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying are mentioned as examples of original musicals. The first four were actually adapted from non-musical stage plays, and Auntie Mame itself was originally a novel. How to Succeed was originally a book.
  • Frank Wildhorn's Bonnie and Clyde musical was Based on a True Story, not the 1967 film on the same subject.
  • If/Then wasn't the only original-to-the-stage musical on Broadway in the spring of 2014...The Book of Mormon, which happens to be one of the biggest stage hits in years, was still running.
  • Stage musicals falsely accused of being direct film adaptations are American Psycho, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, From Here to Eternity, A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder (of Kind Hearts and Coronets), High Fidelity, and Matilda. All six stories originated as novels, two of which were written by the same author. While their film adaptations did predate their stage incarnations, the musicals return to their respective novels as the jumping-off point; Charlie does include some internal homages to and one song from its two film incarnations, but is a very different beast than either (though the later Retool mounted on Broadway does play as a really loose adaptation of the 1971 film).
  • The article largely forgets that there's a reason the trope All Musicals Are Adaptations exists.
• an article about the then-lost animated short film called Clock man or O Paradive Sally The writer says that a user named Commander Santa talked about the short film on 4Chan, When it was actually on a Halo discussion forum called The Flood on Bungie in 2012.
• an article on Synesthesia says it's a brain condition when it's actually a phenomenon in the brain rather than a condition.
• in an article about frame rates The writer says cartoons and animation as if they're two different things when cartoons and animations are the same thing, this can be possibly due to the writer not knowing that cartoons and animations are the same subject.
• an article about timing and spacing in animation claims that animation is photographs of still drawings and paintings, animation is not photographs of still drawings and paintings, 2D animation is still drawings and paintings that are done frame by frame, live-action and stop-motion is still photographs, the writer behind this article didn't fact check what 2D animation was.

an blog post about Mona Lisa done in different styles lists the first image as manga-anime. although manga and anime have different art styles, there's no such word as manga-anime, the blogger should've put a slash between the words manga and anime. The blogger also misspelled South Park as southpark.

---