"Holding the meter near an analogue CRO screen will reveal if this is the case. "

Ha. Try finding one these days. I got a couple laying around not hooked up. Gave Ma one when her XBR took a **** and it is CRT. But I bet if I walked up and down the street and banged on people's door I would have to walk miles before finding anyone with a CRT based TV.

Years ago people were already laughing saying "TVs are flat now, stupid".

So how do we indicate if something is magnetically charged with the lack of color CRTs or whatever ? I was thinking a guitar string but how do we know it itself is not magnetised ? I fit is used it has spent alot of time right in front of a pretty strong magnet. See if it attracts to other strings ? I guess that might work.

I think this guy needs to wrap wire around those jaws, and out of phase so they don't blow the thing out (or disconnect it) and just demagnetize it with a stepdown transformer to something reasonable so as not to blow the variac either and give it a good douche of 50 or 60 Hz, depending. If the bogus reading goes away we know what happened.

Now if it doesn't, the plot thickens.