Just how ignorant are network news anchors?

Don't ask, but consider that while cruising the channels, the guy on CNN Newsnight said that the new object discovered, several billion miles away, was the "most distant object found in the universe."

More ignorant that you can possibly imagine. It's pathetic.

Remember when those comet shards hit Jupiter some time back? I recall someone (Jay Manifold, I think) telling me of a reporter who, while interviewing an astronomer on the topic, asked the burning question, "Should we take precautions?"

Somewhere I"ve got a screen shot taken from CNN the day Columbia perished. The screen crawl claims something like "Columbia was going 18 times the speed of liight . . . "

It's an indication of how small their "universe" is.

>"Columbia was going 18 times the speed of liight . . . "

I KNEW that Columbia broke up during a secret test of the FTL drive taken off the Roswell ship! Now I have the proof I need!

:)

Bob

The scary thing is... If this is the quality of the press' fact checking on astronomy items, is their fact checking equally poor in other areas? Like, perhaps, their reporting on key political issues???

- Eric.

Well, they are not quite as dumb as the people who decided to buy into Bart Sibrel's Apollo "hoax" productions.

CNN got duped "live" this past weekend by a crank caller who claimed to be the sheriff working that California mass murder story. Perhaps the CNN producers are the real dummies. The anchors are probably just mindlessly reading the teleprompter.

Eric

"he scary thing is... If this is the quality of the press' fact checking on astronomy items, is their fact checking equally poor in other areas? Like, perhaps, their reporting on key political issues?"

I've observed that, when an article in the general press covers a topic I'm familiar with, the odds are pretty good that something will be 'wrong' - incorrect facts, wrong conclusion, or statements so at odds with reality that it's hard to understand what is going on in the narrative.

It seems far fetched that they would only get 'things' wrong in my subject matter area. But that's my opinion.

Back in the 80s and 90s I used to hang out at the National Press Club in Washington DC (don't ask, it's not a pretty story). I could listen to many reporters from many different media talking amongst themselves. The degree of _wilful_ ignorance was breathtaking. Until that time I sort of thought reporters and newscasters were noble or at least had the General Good at heart. Those blazing converstations of hate against science, engineering and technology in general disabused me of any respect I had for the breed. Almost as bad as lawyers (Glenn Reynolds being a notable excention!)

Once upon a time, in another life, I worked as a public affairs hack for DoD. I dealt with a lot of reporters and media people. Here's what I learned:

1) Hide your pens.

2) Reporters want stories, which may or may not be the "truth", (whatever the hell that is...). Most reporters show up knowing what kind of story they want to leave with.

Brian, I was about to say the same thing, but you beat me to it. I see errors in technical articles all the time, and I KNOW I'm missing more than I find. And, in every non-technical article where I have personal knowledge, there have been serious errors.

Rand, that doesn't surprise me at all. I've seen too many people who can't answer the question "What is the third planet from the sun?" It gets much worse if you ask which is the fourth. Anything beyond that might as well be in another Universe.

VR,

Everyone knows that the fourth planet from the sun is Barsoom.

What .. they don't? Savages, all.

Although I think that the press is pretty awful at covering science and space (watch for my article on the $1 trillion cost estimate for the new space plan), it is _possible_ that the guy simply misspoke. Even really smart and knowledgeable people can make these kinds of mistakes. I've said "the Soviet space program" when I meant the "Russian space program." And I've said "Jupiter" when I meant "Saturn."

The bigger problem with cable news channels is that they shovel their material onto the airwaves constantly. As a result, their quality control is lousy. If you watch Headline News for several hours straight, you'll start to catch the problems. I have seen the news presenter say things that directly contradict the information on their crawl at the bottom of the screen. And I've also seen the presenter say one thing to introduce a story and then the story says something else.

Perhaps the news anchors got their starts as screenwriters. Even as good a movie as "The Day The Earth Stood Still" had its alien protaganist, supposedly from the other side of the galaxy, say "I didn't travel 200 million miles to come here and solve your petty squabbles." As if this were some vast, inconceivable distance. (Perhaps Michael Rennie didn't know better, but Klaatu should have.) And that pales compared to the early 50's film "Rocketship XM" - supposedly a moon landing mission, a guidance malfunction has the ship missing the moon -- and winding up on Mars!

Bruce -

Also, people were amazed at a spacecraft that could manage a piddling 4000 miles an hour or so. When I mentioned that years ago on a BBS, one fellow responded that that was A LOT at the time, higher speeds would have been very hard to believe. Also, very little was known about the solar system. Worse to me are all the movies and tv shows going up to the '70s where all the aliens always seemed to come from "another galaxy." I always wondered how they managed to pick our star out of the 300 billion or so they could choose.

VR,

How they picked us out of 300 billion stars? Easy. They picked up the above mentioned bad '50's sci-fi on their pan-dimensional inanity detector. They really came for the comic relief.

- Eric.

Someone asked "if CNN is incompetent in Astronomy, are they equally incometent in dealing with political issues".

I have proof that they ARE:

http://www.homepagepal.com/cnn_got_duped/cnn.html

JM