As covered in a number of sources in the blogosphere already, CBSNews.com (among many other outlets) recently ran a ridiculous story claiming that global warming causes intensified earthquakes. I won't get into the details of that story here; suffice it to say that the story is completely unsupported by the science and the author is a total crackpot. The details of CBS's printing of the story are what interest me.
It appears that CBS put the story up on their website, like other sites, but then took the story down. While it was up, it was attributed to the AP, but it's not an AP story. That was likely just an error on some CBS web-monkey's part. That CBS took the story down actually speaks well of them, to an extent. It still resides MSNBC.com and Yahoo sites, among other places. It would have been better if they'd never printed it in the first place, but they at least corrected their mistake, or erased it anyway.
Of course, the conservative blogosphere jumped all over this, but they totally missed the actual problem with this incident. Rather than look at the underlying issue of prepackaged "news" being distributed by companies like MarketWire and printed by corporate media outlets like CBSNews.com and MSNBC.com, they focused their ire on the "dirt worshippers" in the "liberal media" trying to enforce the "cult of global warming." To the blogs I came across in looking into this story, the real concern seemed to be that people were reporting stories related to global warming. That the story was really just a press release paid for by Tom Chalko or one of his corporate interests and reported as news was of secondary concern, only worth mentioning to sling mud at the so-called liberal media.
Whether media outlets have a perceived liberal or conservative bias, people should be much, much more concerned about the quality of the reporting or the lack thereof. CBS should actually receive a small amount of praise for taking the stupid thing down when they realized their mistake in printing it. They should be lambasted, though, like any other outlet that printed this story, for not bothering to even double-check the crap their pulling from the wires.
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