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August 26th, 2008
09:38 am - Metro Fact Squad GO!
Today's lovely Moment of Journalistic Excellence comes from a tiny snippet of news that the Boston Metro ("You Get What You Pay For -- Plus Sudoku!") picked off the AP, where a woman's body was found yesterday morning in a nearby body of water. The piece mentioned that the body was found near the Congress Street bridge, so the Metro aggregators helpfully headlined the story "Body Found in Fort Point Channel".
The facts that the body of water was reported as Salem Harbor, that the woman was identified as a Salem resident and that the location in the byline was listed as Salem did not deter our Metro aggregators from claiming the story took place in South Boston. Boldly they marched ahead, noticing one location element out of four and then leaping happily to conclusions for their headline.
After only a cursory search of Google Maps, I found that Salem does indeed have its own Congress Street bridge and that the discovery of the body in the water did indeed occur in Salem. This research took me less than two minutes, tops, and that includes the time it took to cut and paste the URLs into this entry. Now I know in the grand scheme of things a mislabelled headline isn't so bad, but you know, the fact that the Metro couldn't even take the time to do even the least amount of fact checking for a headline which they concocted themselves is so damn lazy, it's downright embarrassing.
People have already made geographical jokes about Russia invading Georgia (Atlantans, run for your lives!) so I won't attempt to end with one. I'll just do that eye roll with a head shake and half-smile that just sums a lot of things up these days.
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Thanks. Sad story. Gulu-Gulu is a very Davis-esque place and has quite the colorful group of fun, happy staff. Ugh, is it too much to ask that a major metropolitan area has a decently fact-checked paper? OMG that's hilarious. If you don't link to this entry to Universal Hub, I will. Never mind, Adam got to it before either of us did! |
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