Trey Wingo had a bit of a scare today as a bear tried to enter his house, or at least that’s what it looked like. Wingo posted a pic on his Twitter account of a bear standing on the porch railing and peering into the glass door.
So… a bear just walked up to our back porch pic.twitter.com/hBCgpbYLMx
— trey wingo (@wingoz) February 22, 2020
There’s just one problem with this picture. That photo is from 2017 so unless Wingo developed the ability to travel back in time (which would honestly be kick ass), there’s something else going on here.
Sure enough, a CBS News article and video from May 2017 contained the bear in the exact same pose with the same tags on its ears and standing on the same colored deck as the pic Wingo posted. Googling “bear tries to break into home” will get you to the pic as well. Scrolling through replies, others have pointed out that this didn’t really happen to Wingo.
I’m honestly not sure why Trey decided to post a pic of a bear from nearly three years ago and act like this happened to him. Surely, there are better and more honest ways to generate social media engagement. If it was meant to be a joke or a test to see how many people one can fool, I guess “mission accomplished” because a bunch of people believed that.
Sure, this isn’t sports so it’s not like this automatically means Wingo would bend the truth on a sports story. But with an abundance of “fake news” out and about on social media and people already distrusting the mainstream media, it’s probably best to not risk your reputation on something this dumb and something that can be so easily disputed.