Sensationalism, Part II

Ready for more sensationalist news? They have changed the headlines from "spaceship" to "sibling of dinosaur killer"

Phil Plait was right, it was an asteroid collision. And now that we know more, those asteroids belong to the Flora family of asteroids.

Even when some media sources finally agree that it's an asteroid collision, they swing in a different direction and says that this is *drumroll* the BROTHER of the dinosaur killer *cue evil music, (maybe the Imperial March)*

News from io9

From Newsdaily

What does "related" in the headlines mean anyway? How many asteroids are actually in the Flora family? The asteroid is just a rock out of billions. I could equivalently post a news with the headlines: "Lim Yen Kheng is possibly related to Barack Obama. Possible tensions to US-Malaysia ties." Why? Because the odds of that are about the same as P/2010 A2 being related to the "Dinosaur Killer"

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.