Friday, August 10, 2007
Middle-schooler fact-checks Reuters, scoops 57 million bloggers
I know I'm late to this story, but I can't stop myself from linking:
News agency Reuters has been forced to admit that footage it released last week purportedly showing Russian submersibles on the seabed of the North Pole actually came from the movie Titanic....
The mistake was only revealed after a 13-year-old Finnish schoolboy contacted a local newspaper to tell them the images looked identical to those used in the movie.
Seriously?
Note that this is not a moment for blog-triumphalism -- a middle-schooler found the mistake, called an actual newspaper, and the story rolled from there. The incredible thing is that millions of bloggers, or even the mere several tens of thousands who write general interest blogs, failed to nail Reuters first.
A dark day for the blogosphere, to be sure.
3 Comments:
By 
, at
Sat Aug 11, 12:49:00 AM:
And i understand that USA TODAY once had gang member pose holding guns just typical of a bunch of lying liberal left-wing journalists you cant trust these scoundrels
By 
Georg Felis, at
Sat Aug 11, 07:18:00 PM:
Sounds like the press violated Evil Overlords List #12: One of my advisor's will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.
By Dawnfire82, at
Sat Aug 11, 09:05:00 PM:
Oddly, everyone thinks highly of the kid, but no one seems all that concerned by this instance of willful deception by a major news agency. Can't blame foreign stringers for this one, can they?
I suppose that ought to be 'news agency' now.
