A brief example of how reporting can be worse than useless
ABC News:
Next, the National Police Agency used a pumper truck to launch 11 water cannons from the ground. The results were deemed a failure by officials, Japanese broadcaster NHK reported.
Did Japanese broadcaster NHK actually report that?
If you look at NHK's headlines, they sort of did:
Police failed to spray water to cool No.3 reactor
But note that that's not "the results were deemed a failure by officials," that's NHK's statement that the operation failed. But now read NHK's full story linked to from that headline:
Japan's Self-Defense Forces have sprayed water on the overheated No.3 reactor of the quake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
The forces finished the 30-minute operation on Thursday evening. Five fire engines loaded with a total of 30 tons of water were used.
But the Defense Ministry says it has not confirmed whether the water reached the storage pool housing spent fuel rods, though it reached the inside of the building that houses it.
The story doesn't say that the police failed to spray water. It doesn't say the operation failed. It doesn't say that the government said that the operation failed. It says that the Defense Ministry says it hasn't confirmed whether water made it into the pool.
So note this progression:
1. The actual NHK reporting: "The Defense Ministry says they don't know if it worked or not.
2. The NHK headline: "It didn't work!"
3. The ABC story: "NHK says that government officials said it didn't work."
Only two iterations and now patently false information is being reported as fact.
Disaster reporting is uniformly horrible by its very nature. On one hand you have a huge audience of people hungry for information, so there's every incentive to give it to them. On the other hand you have reporters who almost by definition are unfamiliar with nuts and bolts of what they're reporting on who need to write something, anything, and get it out. On the other other hand you have them citing each other as sources. And they're even in the first place being told conflicting information from their primary sources, because those primary sources are each working with an incomplete and conflicted set of data. It's a giant incestuous orgy of ignorance, a MMORPG version of the Telephone game. Except for the broadest possible strokes, you can't paint any sort of picture here, you can't turn bad, fragmentary, incomplete, and contradictory data into useful conclusions.
But that doesn't mean you can't lead people to *think* they can.
Next, the National Police Agency used a pumper truck to launch 11 water cannons from the ground. The results were deemed a failure by officials, Japanese broadcaster NHK reported.
Did Japanese broadcaster NHK actually report that?
If you look at NHK's headlines, they sort of did:
Police failed to spray water to cool No.3 reactor
But note that that's not "the results were deemed a failure by officials," that's NHK's statement that the operation failed. But now read NHK's full story linked to from that headline:
Japan's Self-Defense Forces have sprayed water on the overheated No.3 reactor of the quake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
The forces finished the 30-minute operation on Thursday evening. Five fire engines loaded with a total of 30 tons of water were used.
But the Defense Ministry says it has not confirmed whether the water reached the storage pool housing spent fuel rods, though it reached the inside of the building that houses it.
The story doesn't say that the police failed to spray water. It doesn't say the operation failed. It doesn't say that the government said that the operation failed. It says that the Defense Ministry says it hasn't confirmed whether water made it into the pool.
So note this progression:
1. The actual NHK reporting: "The Defense Ministry says they don't know if it worked or not.
2. The NHK headline: "It didn't work!"
3. The ABC story: "NHK says that government officials said it didn't work."
Only two iterations and now patently false information is being reported as fact.
Disaster reporting is uniformly horrible by its very nature. On one hand you have a huge audience of people hungry for information, so there's every incentive to give it to them. On the other hand you have reporters who almost by definition are unfamiliar with nuts and bolts of what they're reporting on who need to write something, anything, and get it out. On the other other hand you have them citing each other as sources. And they're even in the first place being told conflicting information from their primary sources, because those primary sources are each working with an incomplete and conflicted set of data. It's a giant incestuous orgy of ignorance, a MMORPG version of the Telephone game. Except for the broadest possible strokes, you can't paint any sort of picture here, you can't turn bad, fragmentary, incomplete, and contradictory data into useful conclusions.
But that doesn't mean you can't lead people to *think* they can.