I'm not all that sure American schools even have geography classes anymore. I don't recall ever learning geography in school, but I picked up an awful lot in the years since by reading, traveling, and keeping up with the news. Some people don't do that, they just assume they know where continents, countries, states, and cities are, even when they don't, and they leave evidence on the 'net. The picture below shows a double fail.
Yeah, CNN should have known better than to let an unpaid intern design the graphics, but the guy calling them out made a quite embarrassing mistake, too. That seems like a variation on Muphry's Law. You can see 50 examples of people who are convinced the world is something other than the way it is at Bored Panda.