“How The Mainstream Media Is Failing Us With Its Nuclear Hysteria,” is an item at the liberal Tech Crunch blog, which has gotten mugged by reality when it notices that reality itself is often the one thing lacking in the MSM’s insanely-biased anti-nuclear coverage of Japan:
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.
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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.
At the conclusion of that sentence, I think he’s stumbled over the correct word there.
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