Sunday, June 6, 2010

Sensationalism in News

I came across a recent event that shows off the despicable media habit of over-dramatizing their "news". The event I'm talking about is a Hubble Space Telescope's picture of a suspected asteroid collision. By chance, I surfed to some other sites reporting the same event, but the headline said "spaceship-shaped object" So for the first time, I get to see contrasting behavior side by side, more or less supporting my suspicion. Firstly, here are links to sites containing ACCURATE information: hubblesite.org, the headlines read:
Suspected Asteroid Collision Leaves Odd X-Pattern of Trailing Debris
Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer's own words on the event:
Hubble captures picture of asteroid collision!

Okay. So far so good, right? Here are the "news" reports:
Before It's News it's headlines read:
Hubble Detects Mysterious Spaceship-Shaped Object Traveling at 11,000MPH
Gizmodo.com, same headlines, but with an interesting last paragraph:

"In other words: They have no clue about what this is, and they are still speculating about how this object was formed. Maybe it's time to call Dr. Zarkov."
By "they", they meant scientists. Yeah, right. The scientists have no clue at all, never mind the long blog post from Phil Plait explaining the physics of the event.



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