We constantly harp on bad journalism/bad reporting here. Thought it was about time to start it's own thread. It's just a pet peeve of mine. Here's the article that "broke the camel's back" so to speak:

FBI Agent Killed in Bank robbery Shootout

Okay so he's a writer not a mathematician, but last I checked 3-2=1. I'll concede that they could mean police are looking for the one that escaped and any possible cohorts that they're not aware of. But that's not the case.

Yeah it's a simple slip up, but what happened to they days when writers had editors?

Anyway...feel free to help me fight the news media machine and post your examples of bad journalism. Bah!

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

Theory of Zombie Relativity:
1) Everyone Else is a Zombie relative to You
2) Whether or not it matters is related to the inverse square of the distance between their teeth and your brain
(Quoted from Demigrog)

Could be just a typo --- even Gillianren doesn't (always) correct every 1-letter typo .

I also wonder if the story evolved. I've noticed a lot of errors in web articles when the story has obviously been updated, making a later sentence untrue. For instance, perhaps originally, all three were being searched for. When two were caught, they updated the first sentance, but missed the required edit in the second sentance.

Fox News [the "crawl" along the bottom of TV screen] just reported it was a stake-out that initially netted one suspect and that two suspects fled...
yet their online story contradicts that:

The latest BA blog links to a CBS story which refers to squid as "ink-spewing fish." Ugh.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

I'd like to add this Rockfish
Ok; Ugly fish, and it is in the offbeat section but...

Why is this a story? it's not the biggest, they don't say that it is the oldest. Now; it sounds to me as a rare findl, but they don't say that.

How unusual or rare is this thing?

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

pgh: yeah, it could be a typo. but that's part of my point. these guys write for a living. yes they're only human, but the few mistakes they should make should be caught by the editor.

I'll admit that this is not even close to as bad as some of the stories I read. But like I said it was just the one that I was reading when the totallity of bad writing annoyed me to the point of making this thread.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

Theory of Zombie Relativity:
1) Everyone Else is a Zombie relative to You
2) Whether or not it matters is related to the inverse square of the distance between their teeth and your brain
(Quoted from Demigrog)

Rarely is it the "writer" who typesets the online content.

But I don't disagree with the assertion that Bad Reporting has run amok in this country.
No media is free from it.

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"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view?" - Hugo

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

And in Ohio, that's pretty common. We have 2 things going on, and I'm not sure if they are related.
1) ONN (Ohio News Network). I'm not sure exactly what this is, but I'm getting very tired of local (Cleveland/Akron) news spouting trivial little stories from Columbus and Cincinnati. Are you noticing this?
2) Clear channel. (from what I remember in a conversation some time ago with a radio person) They are flooding the market with low paid "reporters" who are not journalists, and they have a large enough market that people are tuning in to them anyway.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

Can't comment. I refuse to watch ONN, and I detest any clearchannel news station (only time I hear these are the blurbs they do during commercial breaks from talk radio). It just dimays me that accuracy and truth have been shoved aside for sensationalism and ratings. Of course, I'm young and never paid attention to the news until the mid-to-late 90's...so perhaps theynever cared about accuracy or truth. :-P

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

Theory of Zombie Relativity:
1) Everyone Else is a Zombie relative to You
2) Whether or not it matters is related to the inverse square of the distance between their teeth and your brain
(Quoted from Demigrog)

"This... is London."

Yes, once there was accuracy and truth.

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

But around these parts, a lot gets pulled off of ONN as if it got pulled of of the AP. So even though it's not an ONN affiliate or CC affiliate, the way that they do thier News has a large affect on everyone else.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

Ah, well good. And what a novel idea, no? Just make'n sure it wasn't just the "Leave it to Beaver" effect; where we remember the past as better than it actually was.

__________________
I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

Theory of Zombie Relativity:
1) Everyone Else is a Zombie relative to You
2) Whether or not it matters is related to the inverse square of the distance between their teeth and your brain
(Quoted from Demigrog)

One peeve of mine (more of a wild peeve than a pet one) is when a single witness is reported to be helping the police come up with a composite sketch.

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"I have a cunning plan that cannot fail."
S. Baldrick

Composite of reality and stereotype? Maybe they mean they're taking the suspect and putting him in stripes and a black stocking cap, with the large dollar-sign emblazened sack slung over his shoulder.

__________________
I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

Theory of Zombie Relativity:
1) Everyone Else is a Zombie relative to You
2) Whether or not it matters is related to the inverse square of the distance between their teeth and your brain
(Quoted from Demigrog)

More likely they mean a composite of standard noses, lips, eyes, hairlines, moustaches, etc. from a police artist's kit.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

No, though I do almost inevitably cringe. (Like when Fazor used the wrong "its" in the OP.) However, I did correct every single typo in my copy editor days; the paper didn't go to bed until either my cohort Mosang or I had gone over every single character in the paper except the ads, which weren't our problem. (Besides, our managing editor had started her work on the paper as a copy editor herself; she knew when the ads were wrong. She was also the one I had edit my column, because I trusted her more than I trusted Mosang.)

The problem is, the publishing industry no longer considers a proofreader to be a vital expense. That's what spell- and grammar-check are for.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I think that you didn't go to be until either!

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"The other planets?
Well, they just happen to be there, but the point of rockets is to explore them!"
-- Kai Yeves

See, that's why I had someone else proof my column--I didn't know what you were talking about until about the third time I read that, because I saw the "d" that I had intended to type. (I hate my keyboard; the space bar sticks, so I end up backspacing a lot to insert spaces, and it screws up the ending of words if I backspace too far.)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

To me, typos aren't the stuff of bad reporting. Rather, gross misstatements of fact, of being so unschooled on a particular subject that the reporter reports something as fact when it's clearly just more fodder for some organization with an agenda - now that's bad reporting.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol.

Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that.

I am human. Fully human.