After a harmless Hilary Swank interview remark made by Kim Masters on Monday’s edition of KCRW-FM program The Business, the sound bite was picked up Tuesday by EW and TMZ, continuing on today via CNN.com. Each of these reports skipped over the part where Masters quickly apologized, acknowledging that her observation that Swank and Meryl Streep are not “pretty girl”-like came out wrong.

But that’s enough for an Internet news trail. Would you believe that TMZ got 200,000 clicks in a poll asking readers to rank the relative horizontal hotness of Masters and Swank?

The farther away this non-item gets re-purposed, the more ridiculous it becomes. For example, today on UK website MusicRooms.net, the whole thing was framed as “a brutally honest attack.”

Swank spoke to Masters in connection with the May 6th Kate Hudson comedySomething Borrowed, which she produced in partnership with Molly Smith.