Anecdotes are usually highly misleading or wrong.

Stella Awards. An egregious example of this is a list of six crazy “real lawsuits” circulating around the Internet since May 2001, all of which are entirely made up. According to Snopes.com, a website that debunks urban legends, “All of the entries in the list are fabrications – a search for news stories about each of these cases failed to turn up anything, as did a search for each law case.” 3 In 2003, Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz reported on confronting U.S. News & World Report owner Mort Zuckerman about referencing these fictitious cases. “Great stuff,” said Kurtz after describing two of the crazy lawsuits cited by Zuckerman. “Unfortunately for Zuckerman, totally bogus. Two Web sites -- StellaAwards.com and Snopes.com -- say the cases … are fabricated, and no public records could be found for them. Zuckerman has plenty of company. A number of newspapers and columnists have touted the phantom cases since they surfaced in 2001 in a Canadian newspaper.”4 . . . .