Tech Crunch adds to the conversation:
The news from Japan is both awful and appalling. Awful: 23,000confirmed dead or missing, and counting. Appalling: pretty much anything to do with the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant. Nuclear meltdown like Chernobyl! Deadly contaminated milk and radioactive tap water! Tokyo a postapocalyptic ghost town! A plume of radiation that threatens America’s West Coast!
Where do they get these morons? Again, twenty thousand people are dead, and the drooling dimwits of the media can’t stop babbling about Fukushima, where exactly one person died – a crane operator who had the misfortune to be up in the cab of his vehicle when the fifth largest earthquake in recorded history hit – and fewer than 30 were injured, only a handful of whom required treatment for radiation exposure.
The video below shows the quality of reporting the west has been involved in:
Nancy Grace vs. Weatherman - Argue Radiation
Even many intelligent people on Twitter can see what is actually going on here. Twitterer William Gibson tweets:
@GreatDismalWilliam Gibson
Western media in race against time; hysterical nuclear bullshit nearing critical meltdown, yet millions are still uncontaminated.
Of course I’m far from the first to be furious about this. Talking Points Memo, James Altucher, and Tim Bray, among many others, led the way. Noted environmental activist George Monbiotargues that Fukushima should turn people pro-nuclear power. But the voices of reason are mostly lost in the hurricane of panicked nonsense.
What went wrong? Well, never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to ignorance, so I’m going to optimistically argue that the basic problem is that most journalists simply don’t have a clue when it comes to science and engineering. They don’t understand what they’re writing about; they don’t know which questions to ask; they don’t understand that science, unlike the arts, is ultimately about provability and falsifiability, not interpretation and opinion; they don’t know when government advice is reasonable and when it’s terrified CYA boilerplate; and they don’t know when to call bullshit on whatever source they have dredged up to provide “balance,” which they worship beyond all explanation.
Worse yet, instead of linking to their sources, they expect us to take what they say on faith.
Yes, this is an important point that I have been talking about all along: Instead of taking reports and commentary by pundits as gospel truth, reports that use words like, "may," "might have," etc. etc... We should consider opinions of experts and not news pundits like that hysterical woman, Nancy Grace, who is only concerned with garnering high ratings. As responsible adults, we must only take into consideration news articles that are backed up by facts with links that can be verified by us, the reader.
The Tech Crunch writer brilliantly sums it all up in his article:
The Tech Crunch writer brilliantly sums it all up in his article:
This is all just going to get worse, because, increasingly, all stories are tech stories. Politics? Obama’s staggering online fundraising. Sports? BALCO and high-tech new equipment. Culture? These days, even fine art is all about the Arduino. Technology has insinuated itself into our lives to such an extent that every story now has a technical aspect — but yesterday’s dinosaur journalists will continue to write about them in the same clumsy-to-moronic way that they wrote about Fukushima.
Disaster there was averted by genuine heroism and desperately hard work. Nuclear power is potentially extremely dangerous and raises many serious issues, and it’s important to debate them in a well-educated way. Instead we got a crowd of fearmongering idiots, each trying to shriek louder than the last. As a result, Fukushima was the first major world story for which the best way to stay well-informed was to tune in to the knowledgeable blogosphere—and tune out the so-called “mainstream media.” We all know they’re dying. Now I’m starting to wonder why we should care.
Intelligent people shouldn't care what happens to the MSM. It's when the effects of the MSM panic and hysteria poison the minds of those around us that we should care - or, even better - get angry.
Thanks to Victor Vorski
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