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  • 2006-02-25 (xsd:date)
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  • Confessions for the Holidays (en)
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  • Ben Stein, a lawyer by training, has also served as a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon, has to date authored dozens of books (both novels and non-fiction efforts), and continues to write editorials and columns for a number of publications. He is perhaps best known to the world at large, however, for his in-front-of-the-camera work as the dreadfully dull economics teacher in the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, his similar role as the monotonic science teacher Mr. Cantwell on the TV series The Wonder Years, and as the keenly competitive host of the former Comedy Central game show Win Ben Stein's Money. Mr. Stein has also offered occasional commentaries for the CBS Sunday Morning news program, and the item quoted above is based on one such commentary, titled Confessions for the Holidays and delivered by Mr. Stein on that program on 18 December 2005, one week before Christmas. However, we rate this item only partly true because the versions of this piece which now circulate online typically contain transcription errors, present only a truncated version of the original, and include additional text and other modifications that were not part of the piece as it was first aired. Here is the full version as broadcast, taken from a CBS News transcript of the program: The following bit about the White House's supposedly renaming Christmas trees as holiday trees began circulating on the Internet at the head of the Ben Stein Christmas piece in October 2011: Ben Stein's Confessions for the Holidays debuted in December 2005, and the (false) the White House is now going to call them holiday trees didn't appear until August 2009, so no, the former was not written as a reaction to the latter. (As detailed in our White House Christmas article, Christmas trees continue to be referred to as Christmas trees by the White House, and at no point were they ever called anything else.) In mid-2006, someone added the following coda (not written by Ben Stein) to this piece. It combines older items about a television appearance that Anne Graham Lotz (the daughter of evangelist Billy Graham) made just after the September 11 terrorist attacks and the false claim that the son of child care expert Dr. Benjamin Spock committed suicide: In 2014 the entire conglomeration mistakenly came to be attributed to journalist Steven Levy. (en)
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