The Ohio State Buckeyes football team is in the news as it marches towards a potential national title. However, the OSU Marching Band was making headlines last week as well.
Word started to spread on Ohio State message boards and Facebook pages in recent weeks about an upcoming documentary about the Ohio State University Marching Band (OSUMB) that would debut on Netflix. There was reason to presume this might be true as the band, which is nicknamed The Best Damn Band in the Land (TBDBITL), is one of the few all-brass and percussion bands at a major university and dates back to 1878.
The social media announcements would point to a series of websites with strange names and URLs, all of which touted the announcement without providing much, if any, citations.
If the news sounded too good to be true, it was. The Columbus Dispatch’s Amani Bayo reported Friday that the rumors were false and the in-depth information found online was effectively just clickbait.
“We’re not getting a Netflix documentary,” Konner Barr, communications director for the band, told the Dispatch. Barr also noted that the Facebook pages that promoted the rumor often post false stories about OSUMB but have no affiliation with it or the university.
Given the current state of social media and guardrails against false information, coupled with the glut of documentaries being greenlit by streamers like Netflix, it makes a lot of sense why a rumor like that might spread. It feels like the kind of niche topic that would get the documentary treatment these days.
However, it also makes sense when you do a search for similar documentaries and come to find that like-minded fake stories for college bands (and other kinds of bands) are all over Facebook these days.
Stay safe out there, and always check your sources.
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