When Flyers beat writers aren’t complaining about the team’s use of social media or organizing their quote transcription sharing service to bring you widely varied and unique takes, they are tweeting out facts. Tweeting, like beats. But what happens when #tweetlikeabeat goes astray and one reporter retweets a random account and then another reporter trumpets it as fact and yet another, the most notable of the group, retweets him?

Clusterfuck, you have.

It’s a mundane news bit, but it’s also a mundane news day. So we bring you this tale:

It all started at 12:12 a.m., when Delco Times reporter Rob Parent retweeted an unknown account, which claimed that Ilya Bryzgalov got destroyed by the Blackhawks in his Oilers debut (Blackhawks won 5-1):

Only… he didn’t. He gave up one goal in relief and actually played quite well, stopping 12 of 13 shots. But never mind fact-checking. Since this group is so anti-social media but so fond of masturbating themselves to the same inverted pyramid climax, they just went with it.

Samuel?

Nope.

Carchidi was then retweeted by Tim Panaccio.

The backlash – quite a bit for 12:30 in the a.m. – came quickly, like beat writers ejaculating inaccurate commodity to the masses:

Carchidi (commendably) apologized and then confessed his love for Bryzgalov because, obviously, that has something to do with something:

I wasn’t throwing him under the bus, I love that man!

I’m legitimately thinking about hiring trained monkeys and getting them Flyers credentials for a month to see if they’ll be able to fling as much shit into the ether as their colleagues. The odds will be stacked against them.