‘Beer pong,’ oral herpes story discredited

The drinking game "beer pong" might be spreading oral herpes on university campuses nationwide, but you didn't hear that from the Centers for Disease Control. And Arizona State University President Michael Crow isn't distributing virus-free plastic cups to assist underage drinking in the dorms, contrary to online news reports this week.

Those two details were reported in an error-riddled article published Wednesday on the Web site of NBC's Los Angeles affiliate, KNBC. The station removed the article from its site, as well as that of MSNBC.com, and posted a correction after the Tribune inquired about its reporting.

The article - headlined, "Unprotected Beer Pong May Give You More Than a Buzz" - announced that the federal government had found a massive increase in college student cold sores. It quoted Crow as saying that ASU is instituting a program to halt the spread of herpes akin to giving intravenous drug users clean needles.

The fabricated quote claims that Crow said, "We're aware that we cannot outright prevent (beer pong), so we have provided new red cups available to all students in the dorms."

Crow didn't even speak to the article's author, Anna Carranza.

"President Crow has never heard of this and did not make the statement that is attributed to him in the article," said Terri Shafer, an ASU spokeswoman.

The CDC says it has never studied, let alone documented, a link between beer pong and oral herpes, said Candice Burns, an agency spokeswoman. "This was a rumor that went around last year at this time."

Dan Gillmor, an ASU journalism professor and director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, said this spread of false information shows a worrisome lack of reporting by journalists.

"What's interesting, particularly in this story, is the people who failed to use judgment and who are the primary spreaders of something false, are the people we normally count on to exercise judgment," Gillmor said.

John Lloyd, KNBC's senior news editor, said the article's author is an editorial assistant and that her superiors did not verify her work for accuracy. Carranza pulled the information from online sources without any attribution or original reporting, Lloyd said.

"Usually the contributor just submits it to somebody and one of the Web people will read it over," he said of the station's Web reporting operation. "The mistake here is that this was probably her first post. It's something that will not happen again."

The Los Angeles station is only the latest media outlet to falsely report that herpes rates have soared among college students due to the popular drinking game.

It appears to have begun on the Web site BannedInHollywood.com, which in July posted an article written to mimic an Associated Press dispatch from Atlanta reporting the erroneous CDC findings and the fabricated Crow quote.

Ohio State University's student newspaper, The Lantern, published an article Feb. 11 that discussed how playing beer pong puts students at risk of contracting a number of viruses, including mono and herpes. UWire, a news service that distributes content from college newspapers, picked up the article.

A spate of other student reporters at campuses across the country wrote local versions of the same story. On Feb. 22, The Massachusetts Daily Collegian joined the pack, publishing an article that carried the erroneous statement: "According to the Center(s) for Disease Control, unprotected beer pong play is nearly as dangerous as unprotected sex."

Michael King, the Daily Collegian's editor-in-chief, said the newspaper decided to write its own article after seeing The Lantern's piece on UWire. However, it's reporting did not include a call to the CDC to confirm that it had actually studied a link between beer pong and herpes.

"Our news editor looked into it, sort of the day after, because he noticed that we didn't really attribute a source," King said. A call to the CDC revealed that the agency doesn't employ the official named in the UWire dispatches.

The Daily Collegian removed the herpes article from its Web site.

But not before "Fox & Friends," a Fox News morning show, reported that, "beer pong has been linked to an increase in diseases." The anchors then demonstrated how to play the game, which involves bouncing ping-pong balls into plastic cups arranged on card tables.

From there, a blog on The Palm Beach Post's Web site continued to highlight the fabricated news.

UWire's news editor, Michelle Starr, e-mailed student newspaper editors on Thursday informing them that the beer pong news was a "hoax."

Starr declined to comment to the Tribune. "I'm not talking for publication," she said.