Wednesday, August 24, 2005

The problem with a 24-hour news cycle.

I'm feeling a little bit twittery these days. My husband is somewhere between Kuwait and Camp Liberty right now. Communication is spotty, and I'm not inclined to go out and about until I've received news that he is safely ensconced at Liberty. Yesterday, I went back and forth between the computer and the quilt I'm working on, obsessively checking my email and the news. There was no email from Steve, but there were plenty of interesting things on the news.

The Canadian media was abuzz yesterday after The Sun media conglomerate published some sensational stories and pictures revealing the whereabouts of Karla Homolka. The papers proclaimed that she was violating at least two conditions of her parole. Oh, her hair is red and she has a dog, now, too. It's in the paper, so it must be true, right?

Except that this information comes courtesy of a petty crook who wrote no less than 20 letters to Homolka's lawyer, requesting that Karla work at his store upon her release from Joliette. Now, why would he go and do a thing like that?

I'm not terribly concerned about Karla Homolka's whereabouts or welfare. Her Karmic fate is pretty much sealed. But chasing her down, and printing the gossip of a crook as if it's gospel truth are unlikely to prevent recidivism in this case.

The rest of the world seemed fixated on allegations that Lance Armstrong was doping. Urine samples preserved from the 1999 TdF indicate that Lance had been taking EPO. Six years ago, the testing was not sophisticated enough to detect EPO use. Now it is.

News flash: Lance did take EPO as part of his recovery from cancer. This was an approved medical use for the drug. It took me all of five seconds to find this information from Google.

It's shameful that the media at large (that means you, Matt Drudge) splashed these sensational headlines on their websites without doing the tiniest bit of research.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If the Media did do research on their newstories, they would have nothing to report.