|
|
|
|
H. Humbert
SFN Die Hard
USA
4574 Posts |
 Posted - 02/11/2009 : 14:14:57
|
Perhaps, like me, you have heard the recent news reports that a 56-year-old woman swam across the Atlantic Ocean?
Turns out she didn't: There were problems with the story from the start. A few of the less-important ones included the fact that Cape Verde is at least 2,400 miles, not 2,100, from Trinidad. And the African islands are about 500 miles off the western coast of the continent, meaning Figge had a huge head start on her trip across the Atlantic. (It'd be like somebody saying they ran across America after starting in Cincinnati.)
Those are trivial though. The real issue stemmed from the fact that swimming 2,100 miles in 25 days is impossible. (Some newspapers picked up on this.) It's infinitely more impossible when somebody only spends 21 minutes swimming during one of those 25 days. Michael Phelps swimming his fastest would take about 20 days to cover that distance. And that's his fastest pace, sustained for three weeks, without ever stopping. Impossible.
Yet, somehow, the AP ran the story even though a few seconds of thought and a pocket calculator was enough to disprove it. |
|
"A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true." --Demosthenes
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." --Richard P. Feynman
"Face facts with dignity." --found inside a fortune cookie |
|
|
filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 02/11/2009 : 17:23:55 [Permalink]
|
Skilled journalists working for the national, mainstream media have, like the Califoria condor, the epotted owl and honest Republicans, become so few in number that they can be considered an endangered species. They do little research and evidently, rarely employ fact-checkers. As long as they can get their copy past some equally sloppy editors, they and their all but brain-spavined readers/vewiers are happy.
That point has been made yet again....
|
"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
|
| Edited by - filthy on 02/11/2009 17:27:40 |
 |
|
|
Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 02/12/2009 : 12:48:15 [Permalink]
|
All I ever see these days is bad journalism. So I am not shocked.
|
Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
Another example of poor journalism
