Dean Esmay posted that he'd heard that the Dover, PA, school board, who is currently being sued for including Intelligent Design in its science curriculum, was mostly voted out of office yesterday. Dean indicated that he hadn't confirmed that was the case, so I thought I'd ask Google News about it.

One of the links Google served up to me was this UPI article, which starts out this way:

PITTSBURGH, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- Pittsburgh voters ousted eight school board members who advocated the teaching of intelligent design along with the theory of evolution in biology classes.

The ninth member of the Dover Board of Education was not up for re-election, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported Wednesday.

Excuse me? Why would Pittsburgh voters oust anyone from the Dover school board? My knowledge of Pennsylvania geography is far from comprehensive (I head up to Elk County every year for deer season), but this didn't sound right to me. So I did a little more research (y'know, that stuff that they don't bother with at UPI).

Sure enough, Dover lies about 150 miles east of Pittsburgh, on the outskirts of York. And just to be sure, I checked with multiple sources to confirm I had it right (gasp!).

Oh, and just to cover all the bases, I looked up the article at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the UPI apparently saw, and they report that "Challengers unseated eight out of nine Dover Board of Education members yesterday..." and further report that "The ninth member of the York County school board was not up for re-election." So it appears that some UPI nincompoop wrote an article without basic geographical knowledge, based on another article that they didn't even bother to read. Sheesh.

Yeah, this journalism thing is pretty difficult stuff. I can see why "real journalists" should have extra privileges and protections not afforded to "fake journalists" like bloggers.