Bush Arrest, Dow Chemical accepts responsibility, and other media events
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/04/2004 - 14:17
(Originally published in Greater Democracy)
Today, I received an email on one of the many mailing lists I am on entitled:
"I thought it was a joke, but...CNN:Bush arrested in Canada for war crimes"
It pointed to a 'CNN' article, which is an amazing article, with some great lines in it. I encourage everyone to read it.
As some of you know, I've joined Investigative Reporters and Editors. I want to find out the real story, and not just rely on secondary or tertiary sources.
The first place I went, still looking at secondary or tertiary sources, was Google News. They pointed to an article on Slate. It talks about how the news made it to the top of Google News. Slate talks about a different article at Axis of Logic, which unlike the one I received a link to, clearly states that it is a "Political Satire". That article also notes, “But Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenant and others in the Bush regime are being charged with war crimes in Germany and that story is serious.”
They link to their own story for further details, which in turn links to an article on DailyKOS. The DailyKos article links to an article in the Frankfurter Rundschau Online. My German isn’t very good, and I’ve probably dug deep enough, so I stopped there.
Subsequently, I received another email saying, “Sorry-It is a spoof after all”.
One of my current passions is to help people think more critically about the news they receive, whether it be from emails, blogs, or traditional media. I hope many people read through this and think about how they process the information they receive.
Related to that is the issue of how ordinary people can get focus on issues that they feel are important. Many people feel that the atrocities that happened at Abu Ghraib and the search for punishing those responsible hasn’t been pursued adequately. The political satire may help raise the visibility of the issue.
A similar report is now emerging about how the BBC was duped into running a story about Dow Chemical taking complete responsibility the Bhopal disaster. This report also got legs and the other media outlets ran with it.
As people get more sophisticated at gaming the media, the media needs to return to its journalist roots and question sources. So must everyone following the news.
As a final note, the Slate article ends with the comment, “A deeper investigation is called for to determine why, in the two years since their invention, Google News' algorithms have yet to develop a sense of humor.”
Perhaps it has.
As soon as I opened the link
Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 12/04/2004 - 19:23.As soon as I opened the link I knew it was a fake (before I read the rest of your post).
By looking at the URL - http://www.world-cnn.com/2004/WORLD/americas/11/30/bush.arrest/index.html
I realized that world-cnn.com is a completely different domain from cnn.com. A really quick check let me know that the World section of CNN's site is http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/ and all the links within that area are just appended on.
greg
check the URL, ferchrissake
Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 12/04/2004 - 21:18.Your investigative skills would have been better applied by simply checking the registration of the world-cnn.com domain:
Registrant:
Liu, Phineas (FBTATHPFWD)
PO Box 20800
NEW YORK, NY 10009
US
Domain Name: WORLD-CNN.COM
Administrative Contact:
Liu, Phineas (38757602P) phineasliu@yahoo.com
PO Box 20800
NEW YORK, NY 10009
US
(212) 253-6203
Obviously, this isn't a Time-Warner property. So it should have been immediately apparent that it was a joke.
But don't let me stop you from burning more time than necessary...
-CT
http://www.populationstatistic.com/
So polite. greg
Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 12/04/2004 - 21:43.So polite.
greg
Lack of reading comprehension
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/05/2004 - 00:13.It appears as if you failed to read or comprehend what I was writing about, which makes you about as bad as the person who sent the email in the first place. Yes, it is obvious, as Greg noted, that this was not the real CNN site. However, the news was repeated on several sites, and picked up as a top story on Google News.
There was a similar incident involving a false report about Dow Jones taking full responsibility for Bhopal. That was further down in my post, but perhaps you didn't get that far.
My entry wasn't about whether or not the first URL I received about the story was really CNN. It should be obvious to most people that it wasn't. The entry was about people who don't pay attention to what they read and don't think about the underlying issues.
Thank you for illustrating my points.
Most people don't grok, it's
Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 12/05/2004 - 00:19.Most people don't grok, it's as simple as that.
It got listed highly in google because of the way google works. It ranks a page by the number of links to it referring to the topical search words (like technorati tries to do). This can be used and abused by people who really want to, by getting several pages to link to the site. By passing the link on to other people who link to it, it grows exponentially. There was a big deal about it last year because of some seemingly random phrases that turned up pages about Bush.
greg
Bush Arrested in Canada for War Crimes
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 12/06/2004 - 12:16.TrackBack from A Day After Yesterday: