The weird news

How a Rocky Mount bear became world famous

So this bear walks into a hospital . . . .

Sounds like the beginning of a joke, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, it isn’t. It’s weird news with a sad ending: the story of a 345-pound black bear who walked into Franklin Memorial Hospital in Rocky Mount on June 15 and was eventually shot by authorities.

You’ve probably heard the story. After all, it was the top "weird" story in local media for a few days.

But it might surprise you to know that our bear story was also popular elsewhere, not only in other states but also on a few other continents. This week, I did a Google news search for "black bear AND hospital AND Rocky Mount" to get results with all those terms.

I got 156 hits, all of them about our bear. The hits included stories in newspapers and TV news broadcasts in nearly every U.S. state and several other countries. Our Franklin County bear might very well be the best-known real bear in the world, right now.

Part of the reason the story moved so quickly is that it was sent out by big wire services, including the Associated Press (AP), the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) and the Tribune Company. The BBC source probably explains the story’s popularity not only in the United Kingdom but also in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

So why in the world are people in other parts of the world interested in our bear?

Among the basic news values – factors that account for why news is news – is novelty. A novelty story makes the news because of its sheer oddness. One of my all-time favorites is the story of a tomato in a hanging wire basket that spontaneously burst while a family was on vacation, dropping tomato guts onto the telephone keypad below it and summoning emergency personnel. It seems the tomato hit the speed-dial button for 911.

A novelty story may not fit any other basic news values, such as proximity, impact, celebrity and conflict. It may be timely, but it has a long shelf life; it can run today, tomorrow or next week. Its weirdness alone will keep it going.

Such is the case with our bear. His story was sufficiently weird that, within a few days, somebody had contacted myth-debunker Snopes.com to ask, "Did a bear really walk into a hospital?"

As I was writing this column, I heard a story on the WDBJ (channel 7) news about a gorilla that escaped from the Berlin Zoo. That story did have timeliness (it happened the day I wrote this). But it lacked every other news value. It was simply an odd story that ended well; the gorilla was led back to his enclosure, and no one was injured. (My favorite line in international coverage of our bear was the BBC’s reporting, "No one, apart from the bear, was injured at the Virginia hospital.")

Novelty stories are so popular that quite a few major news organizations have "weird news" links. These stories are sometimes called "water-cooler stories" because of people’s tendency to circulate them by word of mouth. Worried about making conversation at your next party? Check out the weird news.

As weird news gets distributed, it may also be distorted. This is common on the gossip level. One poster to a news discussion group, defending authorities’ decision to shoot the bear, wrote that the animal might have wandered into a nursery. Within hours, on another web site, someone wrote, "Somebody told me the bear walked into a nursery."

And it isn’t only individuals who distort the story. You could tell which news organizations got the bear story from the Associated Press, because the AP got the bear’s weight wrong. It was 345 pounds, not 300. I was impressed that the BBC got this detail right, as it was reported in relatively localized media. I’m guessing somebody at the BBC actually looked at the Roanoke Times’ story.

In Franklin County, we’ll be telling the story of our bear for decades. I hope someone frames his picture and hangs it in the hospital corridor where he was photographed, just around the corner from the elevator. He deserves that memorial.

In the world we live in, people fly around in airplanes thousands of feet above the ground. Human beings have walked on the moon. Scientists cloned a sheep. Doctors take organs out of one person and put them into another. We talk via cellphone, without the aid of wires, to friends and relatives. Thanks to e-mail, I can get a message to a friend in Austria in a matter of seconds. We have seen so many marvels that it’s easy to conclude we’ve seen it all.

And then a bear walks into a hospital.