Just the facts, please
Sometimes I really hate the internet - it's worse than junior high gossip. Even worse is when media outlets and political figures repeat what they heard online without checking to see if it's even true.
100 AIDS researchers on the Malaysian flight? Not true. I got that from Slate, which is usually a pretty reliable source. Aside from that article, I had been purposefully avoiding reports on the crash until all the speculation had died down. (Alison, I know you mentioned that you'd heard differently - your country is obviously way ahead of the US on this!)
So Friday night, I turned on the Rachel Maddow Show - a news source I trust even more than Slate, one that actually fact-checks and goes back and corrects stories later proven to be in error. And she spent the first fifteen minutes of the show talking about how stupid it is for Western media to disregard Russia's version of events due to their obvious bias while at the same time reporting everything put out by the Ukrainian government as if it's true - when they have just as much of a bias as Russia (even though it's pretty clear that Russia holds the blame for this...), and deploring the lack of evidence-based journalism in the world.
Meanwhile, CNN and Fox are relying on Twitter for their "facts". So frustrating.
There's another story going around now about a Dutch man who was booked on both Malaysian flights (MH17 and the one that went missing) and changed his plans at the last minute- "Miraculous survival!" Yeah, that one is also not true. But no one is correcting the record, so fifty years from now people will still be repeating it as if it's true.
...The same people that only use 10% of their brains. Argh.
(As an aside, I don't understand why we as a culture love "miracles" so much. One man avoids getting on two doomed flights? Miracle! ...But in order for that miracle to happen, almost 600 people had to die. It's like people assume that if a miracle happens, it will be in their favor, when the odds are much higher that they'll be among the people who were killed. If I were in charge of the universe, the miracle would be that not one person was killed, rather than only one person was saved...)
100 AIDS researchers on the Malaysian flight? Not true. I got that from Slate, which is usually a pretty reliable source. Aside from that article, I had been purposefully avoiding reports on the crash until all the speculation had died down. (Alison, I know you mentioned that you'd heard differently - your country is obviously way ahead of the US on this!)
So Friday night, I turned on the Rachel Maddow Show - a news source I trust even more than Slate, one that actually fact-checks and goes back and corrects stories later proven to be in error. And she spent the first fifteen minutes of the show talking about how stupid it is for Western media to disregard Russia's version of events due to their obvious bias while at the same time reporting everything put out by the Ukrainian government as if it's true - when they have just as much of a bias as Russia (even though it's pretty clear that Russia holds the blame for this...), and deploring the lack of evidence-based journalism in the world.
Meanwhile, CNN and Fox are relying on Twitter for their "facts". So frustrating.
There's another story going around now about a Dutch man who was booked on both Malaysian flights (MH17 and the one that went missing) and changed his plans at the last minute- "Miraculous survival!" Yeah, that one is also not true. But no one is correcting the record, so fifty years from now people will still be repeating it as if it's true.
...The same people that only use 10% of their brains. Argh.
(As an aside, I don't understand why we as a culture love "miracles" so much. One man avoids getting on two doomed flights? Miracle! ...But in order for that miracle to happen, almost 600 people had to die. It's like people assume that if a miracle happens, it will be in their favor, when the odds are much higher that they'll be among the people who were killed. If I were in charge of the universe, the miracle would be that not one person was killed, rather than only one person was saved...)