I think it is just one more example of "if it bleeds, it leads". Or, as Sir Winston Churchill once so famously said "a lie , he can get halfway around the world before the truth can get it's pants on".
Americans apparently have an inexhaustible appetite for the prurient and the sleazy. And if anyone makes a living from the printed or spoken word, he or she learns pretty quickly that stories (be they verbal, printed or spoken) about quilting sessions, trimming Crepe Myrtles or model train exhibitions die a pretty quick death. Villagers are probably no more likely--probably a whole lot more UNlikely--to catch a case of sabertoothed crotchcritters than just about any other discrete group in America that you could name, but when it the story is connected to TV, which after all is the largest retirement community on the entire planet with a geographical size bigger than the city of San Francisco and with the financial and other types of clout that it has--well, people are going to notice.
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