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A fake news story claiming that herpes was being transmitted via beer pong on college campuses migrated from a student newspaper to a national student news service to local television to Fox News before coming to rest on the Colbert Report last night.
On February 11, the Ohio State University Lantern ran an article speculating that playing beer pong could transmit mononucleosis and herpes. That piece was picked up by the national campus media service UWire, inspiring similar stories at other campus papers. One of those stories, an article in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, added the false claim that the Centers for Disease Control consider “unprotected beer pong play … nearly as dangerous as unprotected sex.”
It was at about this time that the story made the leap from campus newspapers to local TV news, who — like the Daily Collegian — integrated “facts” from a humor article posted last July at BannedInHollywood.com, into their reporting. KNBC in Los Angeles not only passed on the claim that the president of Arizona State University is distributing germ-free beer pong cups in ASU’s dorms, it reprinted Banned In Hollywood’s fake CDC list of “safe pong” tips. Another station led with the tagline “it’s all fun and games until someone gets herpes.”
From local television, it was a short leap to Fox News, whose morning show Fox and Friends ran a segment in which the show’s anchors discussed the dangers of beer pong while playing beer pong with a doctor in a minidress, as can be seen in the Colbert Report clip.
Another tidbit for our New York readers:
The New School in Exile will be holding a teach-in at 4 pm today in the lobby of the Parsons building at 13th Street and 5th Avenue.
You can find video from their last teach-in at their website.
Take Back NYU is hosting a community forum tomorrow night at 7 to share “thoughts, criticisms, opinions, and frustrations” on last week’s TBNYU Kimmel building occupation. Here’s the info:
We came, we saw, we occupied. Now what?
Two weeks ago, NYU’s Kimmel Center was occupied for just under 40 hours. Take Back NYU! invites you to a conversation about the issues brought up by the occupation. Bring thoughts, criticisms, opinions, and frustrations to engage in a constructive dialogue about TBNYU!, their tactics, their demands, student activism, and social change.
Sponsored by Take Back NYU!
Thursday, March 5, 2009, 7-9 PM
Vanderbilt Hall, 40 Washington Square South, Room 220
Facebook event: tinyurl.com/talkbacknyu
We’ll be there. If you are too, come say hi.
For the last four years a growing movement of Harvard medical students has been working to expose and limit pharmaceutical companies’ influence on their university.
So they were perturbed, to say the least, when they discovered a representative of the giant drug company Pfizer photographing students participating in an on-campus demonstration on the issue last fall.
Pfizer admits that the photographer was one of their employees, but refuses to release the man’s name, and contends, as the New York Times paraphrased their statement, that he “photographed the students for personal use.”
At least 149 Harvard medical school faculty are on the Pfizer payroll in one way or another, and the company finances two research projects and a continuing medical education program on campus. In addition, Pfizer made donations of $350,000 to the medical school last year.
The pharmaceutical industry is already the subject of a Senate investigation of their influence on American medical schools, and yesterday Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley sent Pfizer a letter saying he was “greatly disturbed” by the the incident, which, he said, “raise[s] concerns that Pfizer is attempting to intimidate young scholars from professing their independent views on issues that they think are critical to science, medicine, and the health and welfare of American taxpayers.”
Grassley asked Pfizer to provide him with an accounting of all payments the company made to Harvard medical faculty since the beginning of 2007, and of all corporate “communications [including photos] regarding Harvard medical students demonstrating and/or agitating against pharmaceutical influence in medicine” since the beginning of 2008.
He gave them a one-week deadline to respond, and a Pfizer representative said on Tuesday that it would “fully cooperate with Senator Grassley’s request for information.”
studentactivism.net 
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