The Reuters news agency recently carried two stories archetypical of modern journalism: There's a pregnant man in the Philippines, and South American sheep are going blind because of the ozone hole.

Even when I was working on the high school paper, I remember something about the reporter's duty to ask who, what, where, when and why as in when did he get pregnant and what happened to the sheep?

The sheep story is this: Every spring when the Antarctic late-winter ozone depletion breaks up, chunks of ozone-depleted stratospheric air are whirled away, and a few survive to the latitudes of Puntas Arenas, or the Falkland Islands The sudden burst of ultraviolet-B (UV-B), radiation is strong, and the animals are so stupid that they don't seek shade. Instead, they immediately get cataracts and start bumping into buildings and each other, and falling off cliffs.

As a number of scientists have noted recently, it's easy to go around poking holes in the story about the catastrophic ozone hole. For example, assume that the hypothesized mechanism responsible for its sudden appearance around 1983 a peculiar cloud in the Antarctic stratosphere is real. The National Science Foundation's Susan Solomon has stated on several occasions that ozone depletions will be accelerated by big, dusty volcanoes that put a lot of chlorine, bromine and junk in the stratosphere.

If we compressed geologic time into the space of one year, these explosions would occur every few minutes--they're hardly uncommon. And if they are so common, they can't be apocalyptic enough to threaten the planet. Otherwise we wouldn't be here, and life probably wouldn't have evolved beyond worms or whatever else spends all its time underground.

Still, the combination of stratospheric clouds and CFCs makes a believable, if non-apocalyptic story, which should make it unprintable by today's journalistic standards. Who, what, where, when and why are a bit fuzzy around the edges, but you can still get some logical consistency from the byline to the end.

No so for the sheep. After Newsweek bit on the story and no one else bothered to check the facts, KGO-TV in San Francisco did.

Patagonian sheep are so far south on the planet that there isn't enough UV-B to fry their eyeballs. This is the latitude and climate equivalent of Sweden, a land not known for tanned bodies, except in commercials for fantasybeer. In fact, if this amount of ultraviolet radiation were causing cataracts, every Miami native over the age of 10 should be walking around with a white cane.

KGO sent its science editor. Brian Hackney, down to Puntas Arenas. He holds a degree in physics, and he probably was a little skeptical about sheep being blinded by so little radiation, but the station told him to go anyway.

Upon arriving at the tip of South America, Hackney found blind sheep everywhere. But he sent some eyeballs back to the Veterinary School at the University of California in Davis for inspection. Not a single cataract was found, but there was an epidemic of pinkeye, which is a common ailment of cattle. It's often caused by yeasts that are killed by UV-B.

On to the pregnant man: After Reuters put it on the wire, without many questions, some that seen pretty obvious, the story appeared on virtually every video and radio network. Especially touching was the footage of reporters feeling the "baby" in his belly move, which in reality were the muscles underneath pop's beergut. Where was the rush to consult experts in gynecology? Couldn't someone fly him to Manila for an ultrasound from a doctor not chosen by Mr. Pregnant himself? After all, he might have wanted to know the sex.

No, the reason it took months to figure out that the sheep had a yeast infection and weeks to figure out that a man wasn't pregnant has to do with what has happened to the news business when it comes to scientific and technical issues.

First, few reporters are trained much in math and science, and they are therefore either irrationally skeptical or gullible about both. Second, news budgets have been scaled so far back that any considerable expense (like going to Puntas Arenas or finding our Philippine friend an ultrasound) is frowned upon, especially if it's going to blow the latest spectacular.

In fact, stories like these--including imminent death from the ozone hole or global warming--are immediately advanced to the front page as soon as someone rents a room at the National Press Club and calls every reporter in Washington up for doughnuts and bylines. No one has to travel, it's good copy, and besides, what reporter who avoided calculus feels comfortable asking a quantitative question?

This dance was first called on prime time news in October 1983 when EPA's John Hoffman spoke of tens of feet of sea level rising from global warming beginning around 1990 (that's 2.5 years ago), and it continued through NASA's Feb. 2, 1992, announcement about the imminent ozone hole over Canada (stretched to Kennebunkport by Sen. Albert V. Gore Jr., D-Tenn.), so please bring your sheep indoors.

The fact is, there's little incentive to search for truth on stories like these. That byline, which takes real reporting to get, and says that the world isn't coming to an end, winds up on the back pages, if it's ever printed at all.

And if you think that scientists are going to jump up and say, well, maybe my cash cow (global warming, global cooling, acid rain, the ozone hole, air pollution, water pollution, AIDS, deforestation, biodiversity, population, etc.) isn't the end of the world after all, and please pass the funding somewhere else or just save it, you probably believe that men get pregnant.

Rather, as in most cases where there are large amounts of money and power to fork around, people behave like blind sheep.