Robot Monkeys

So CNN publishes an article about the Great Tomato Scare of 2008 (If anyone wants to use that, you owe me a buck.), and the headline completely misrepresents the article. The headline: “Health Officials Question Whether Tomatoes Behind Outbreak“. And what’s the quote from the story hightlights?
“FDA: ‘There is a strong epidemiological association with tomatoes.’” So where’s the source of the fear?

“Produce investigations are very difficult, because a lot of times, vegetables are eaten all together,” said Dr. Patricia Griffin, chief of the Enteric Diseases Epidemiology Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. That makes it hard to trace back any one item to a source of contamination, she added. “We continue to keep an open mind about the possible source of this outbreak, as does FDA.”

Dr. David Acheson, associate commissioner for foods at the Food and Drug Administration, agreed. “There is a strong epidemiological association with tomatoes,” but the agency is also “looking into other ingredients,” he said.

So you have the scientists basically saying, “While we can’t be 100% sure it’s not from the tomatoes, we really really think it is.” Which of course means the take away is, “Scientists Dumbfounded!”

Now Occam’s Razor and Hanlon’s Razor says that I should attribute this to pure laziness, and that’s probably true. After all, the one story from Billy’s journalism classes is the time the TA or prof tried to explain the concept of a quorum using the example of “one more after the half.” Apparently this was too much more most of the students who would calculate the number required for a quorum as simply half, or one less than half. At least one proclaiming, “We’re not math majors!”

The future of American journalism at its finest.

However, I can’t help but think that this CNN headline is more indicative of American attitudes towards science. Nothing is known for certain, so nothing is known, and therefore everything is equally likely.
I believe this attitude comes from the poor state of math and science education in this country, and the need for “fair and balanced” coverage.

So I was looking at the CNN website and saw two icons sitting next to some of the headlines. One icon was a movie camera, which I knew meant it was a video link. The other icon is a t-shirt. Yes. You can get a t-shirt for selected hard hitting, breaking news stories like, LBJ Tapes reveal sudden about face.

So, why am I supposed to take CNN seriously again? And why can’t I get a t-shirt that reads “350 feared dead in Myanmar cyclone” or “Relative: Incest suspect served time for rape”?

All I need to do is figure out what they’re md5 hashing, and I can make my own!

CNN’s Rick Sanchez is still playing the Jeremiah Wright soundbite on a continuous loop. My god. This has been going on for weeks now. Can we please move past this? No, of course not. This is the easy story. The story that even most simpleton can write – and by “write” I mean “repeatedly play the same pixelated clip from YouTube.”

Of course CNN Newsroom is the crappiest of all the CNN programs. The stories right now on the web page are “Is Your Computer Slower Than When You Bought It?” and a featured article on tattoos.

I’m not surprised. It’s an easy narrative. I guess what makes the whole thing that much sadder is that when Obama said:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

part of me wishes that just for once, the media wouldn’t have interpreted that as a call to arms as Stephen Colbert mocked on his show.