Crowlogic's extinct Bigfoot thread

[William Parcher]

1. 19th century newspapers are far less reliable than newspapers are today. I recommend plugging "yellow journalism" into a search engine for more on the subject.

Bigfoot skeptic boredom brings me back to this.

Wikipedia has an interesting entry for yellow journalism.

Yellow journalism is a pejorative reference to journalism that features scandal-mongering, sensationalism, or other unethical or unprofessional practices by news media organizations or journalists. It has been loosely defined as "not quite libel".

There certainly are a great number of old newspaper articles that are cited by Bigfooters as potential (or probable) secondary evidence of Bigfoot. These are all obviously encounter stories rather than citations of genuine scientific confirmation. The descriptive term often used in print was "wild man". The term "Sasquatch" did not enter common English usage until 1929. The term "Bigfoot" entered the language in 1958.

Yellow journalism that involves a creature like what we might imagine as "Bigfoot" could come in at least three varieties...

1) An encounter story could be entirely fabricated by a journalist, and even going to the extent of using a fictitious name for the witness.

2) An encounter story could be accepted by any reporting witness with no subsequent effort or desire to validate the authenticity of the event or the credibility of the witness.

3) Same as #2 but with the addition of meaningful embellishment by the journalist(s) and/or editor(s) responsible for the final draft copy of the article.

Can anyone think of additional kinds of "Bigfoot" yellow journalism?

Can anyone think of interesting meta-analyses of the existing "database" of news articles that could be attributed to "Bigfoot"? It seems that BFF's "Tirademan" (Scott McClean) is the major figure for this archive of sorts.