Ben Swann Headline: 8th Grader Fibs, Setting Right Wing Blogs Ablaze

Earlier this week, the people over at Ben Swann reported that a South Carolina teacher told a student to change an answer on a pop quiz about the US Constitution.

They have since retracted that story. Their source was lying about the incident. Their source was an 8th grade school girl.

The quiz in question asked if it is constitutional for a police officer to confiscate a gun from a law abiding citizen. According to the young student, the teacher saw the answer "No," and then told the student to cross out that answer because the correct answer was "Yes." Here's the photo of the quiz.

Now, I don't know about you, but when I give a quiz, I rarely walk around the room and tell students when they have an answer wrong. So, right off the bat the story sounded fishy. But I wasn't in the classroom. Maybe that's the way they give quizzes in South Carolina.

No matter the case, the people over at Ben Swann jumped on this story, and the story went viral on the conservative blogosphere. If you go to Swann's site, the only thing you see is the retraction, but if you go to other outlets, you'll have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find the retraction - or at other outlets you may not find the retraction at all.

So, the story is out there, despite it not being true - the story that was not investigated beyond the accusation of an 8th grade student.

I am pleased to see the people at Ben Swann admit their error, but does that make it all okay?

The reporter Joshua Cook didn't even contact the teacher or anyone at the school. It was the parent of the student who thought to call the school and find out more details, and that's when the story started falling apart. The child's parent out-investigated the reporter.

And once a story like this gets released by these non-news outlets, the story becomes evidence in dinning room arguments around the country: "You know what I heard, the Common Core teaches kids that guns are unconstitutional! I read about it in the news."

The retraction won't work, and the editors at Swann know this. This kind of sloppy reporting is intentional. It puts these stories into the mouths of voters, into the email chains, into the fringe blog posts, into the conspiracy theories, and eventually this story will just sound true to people.

I heard about this in a roundabout way. This morning, a friend of mine posted a Slate story about the effort to get evolution out of the curriculum in Texas. The Ben Swann story was posted as a rebuttal from someone trying to make the point that both sides are messing with education. The classic "They did it first" defense.

Interesting timing: Just as the 'fringe religious right' is making news with their efforts to undermine the education of our kids, the 'fringe conspiracy theory right' reports a false story about a government effort to corrupt children's understanding of the Constitution.

That timing suggests a concerted effort to spread the right kind of misinformation at the right time.

If it wasn't such an unethical disservice to the public, it'd be a pretty smart strategy.