You could call this a follow-up to the recent stories about CNN's spectacularly stupid decision to kill its science and technology unit, I suppose. I'm watching MSNBC right now, watching them cover the crash of a Marine FA-18 Hornet in a residential neighborhood in the Miramar, California area.
They're speculating right now - actually, speculating is almost too nice a term - about the number of pilots on board the aircraft. Apparently, the military at the Pentagon is not sure about how many pilots there were, and are a little too busy actually trying to find out what's happening to spoon feed the press their lines of reasoning. This appears to have left the poor folks at MSNBC dependent on their own internal knowledge base.
Which is slightly lacking.
The current line of speculation is that there is a good chance that there were two pilots, because they were told that the plane was on a "training mission." They're apparently unaware that single seat planes do actually go out and train on a regular basis. They're also apparently unaware that there are several different versions of the F-18 flying out of Miramar. Some are two seat versions. Some are one seat.
What I find amusing is not so much that the newsroom staff didn't have that knowledge base, but that the Pentagon correspondent didn't have it, either.
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One of the eyewitnesses reported a second pilot ejecting, but saw no chute. So far as I could tell that was the basis of the speculation on a second pilot.
With advertising money tightening up and traditional media outlets feeling the squeeze, we can expect more of the know-nothing got-it-off-the-wire-service type reporting.
Whenever I point out reporter stupidity to my brother, who has worked with journalists, he insists that they are not stupid, just lazy. I'm inclined to think that they're both.
My dad (Mike's grandfather) was a newspaper man, a reporter and then an editor. He is frequently furious about the quality of journalism.
He believes that it has many sources, and that there has been a sort of domino effect for example, the pressure of "24 hr,up to the minute" TV/Radio journalism left little time for careful fact-checking - or what he calls "whoops, we made a little mistake" reporting - and that younger journalist who've come up since this became acceptable. They are either clueless or simply don't see the need to fact-check.
And then there's the vicious cycle of the "if it bleeds, it leads" school of journalism which leads to more circulation which leads to more advertiser dollars which leads to more drama rather than news.
OK, I just spent 15 seconds at Wikipedia. There's an article on the FA-18. The D variant is a two seater.
However, that doesn't mean someone was in the 2nd seat. Double however, if the front seater ejects, don't you think the 2nd seat might eject also, occupied or not -- just as a safety precaution?
Just a thought.
Perhaps you remember the blond joke where the first class section of the plane is not going to Paris?