Along the lines of my post on Thursday, I found this on TechCrunch. Jon Evans did a great job on this but, it is nearly the inverse of what I was saying as in, the actual events in Japan that matter are being completely overshadowed by coverage of one nuclear power plant. Why so much devoted to an event that really should only have 10-15% of the coverage by comparison to the rest of the news coming out of Japan.
Where do they get these morons? 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 operatorwho had the misfortune to be up in the cab of his vehicle when the fifth largest earthquake in recorded history hit – and fewer than 30were injured, only a handful of whom required treatment for radiation exposure.
and
Every story should link to all of its sources. Today the online story is the story of record; paper is disposable, irrelevant, and obsolete before it’s printed. But too many mainstream journalists still think print-first, which is one reason you get this kind of context-free nuclear hysteria, or “wind farms kill whales”, or the risible “cell phones kill bees” story from The Independent—again, a “serious” newspaper—four years ago.
To be fair, part of the problem is that no mainstream journalist could countenance writing aboutHideaki Akaiwa in a manner as irreverent and entertaining as that of Badass of the Week; and they do still sometimes hit ‘em out of the park. Take this stunning New York Times piece about the so-called Fukushima 50. That is, if you can penetrate the paywall (at least in Canada, where I live). I know they have their reasons, but it’s sad to see the NYT (which has some excellent journalists who do understand technology) about to take two steps back from the online world just when we need them most.