LA Times Taken In By Internet Hoax And Falls For Fabricated Dog and Wolf Story!!

My jaw dropped to the ground yesterday - and only the fact that I was already lying on the ground prevented any serious injury - when I saw the below spurious quote attributed to the Governor of Wyoming now corrected in today's rather plump correction's section:

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Gray wolves - An article in Tuesday's Section A about tensions over the federal effort to reintroduce wolves into parts of the West wrongly attributed to Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal a statement that Wyoming considered the Endangered Species Act no longer in force and "now considers the wolf as a federal dog." The statement, which was circulated on the Internet, was purportedly from Freudenthal but was in fact a hoax.

The first question is - how can the Times quote a Governor without checking to see if he actually said what they quoted him as saying? The second question is - since the fabricated quote is is so well known in the wolf and Western worlds - how could the Times NOT know have known about it being a hoax?

I mean - who are they using for fact checking these days - Mike Davis?