When my buddy first started working in the CDC media relations, I would write scripts and have people pretend to be reporters call him up to ask questions like, "Hi, Im from the Mississippi Enquirer, and there is a real fear of the Ebola virus getting into the snakes that are found around the Mississippi and then used in religious ceremonies in some of our churches. Can you please give a comment?" A personal fave I had a coworker call and say they were from Highlights Magazine (that old one for kids) and they were doing a story on how to prevent kids from contracting computer viruses, now that children were using computers, and could he comment on how the viruses could jump from the computer to the children.

I took it as a personal goal to come up with some hair-brained idea and have the CDC have to comment on it. That was in the early 1990s. Today, I am upstaged by all of these "reporters" out there, and the CDC itself. It's truly remarkable that I could have, and should have started a blog way back then (never knew what one was in those days) and capitalized on fake news stories. I could've been a pioneer!