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| Clearing the Browser Tabs – We Hate Ben Franklin and Germany Sunday Edition Posted: 13 Mar 2011 03:10 AM PDT I don’t know about you, but I keenly dislike Daylight Saving Time. And when I say “keenly dislike”, I mean that I hate it with the fury of ten thousand unfairly-jilted lovers. I hate it like the darkness hates the light. I hate it like Cookie Crook hates that meddling Cookie Crisp cop. I hates it like Gollum hates hobbitses. I suppose maybe I might appreciate it if I was a farmer, but I’m not. I’m a guy who normally had a late coming-in on Saturday and an early going-out on Sunday. I need that hour for study and to relax a bit so I can get some productive sleep. But no Mr. “I Invented Bifocals and Discovered Electricity” had to go and foul up this most beautiful weekend in March with his little suggestion that, believe it or not, didn’t get adopted until around World War I when Germany and her allies put it in place. And now (yawn), links!
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| So, Are We Talking “ZOMG MELTDOWN!” or What? Posted: 12 Mar 2011 02:17 PM PST Like many of you, I’ve been watching the breathless news coverage of the potentially-catastrophic situation at Japan’s Fukijima Daiich nuclear plant. Like many of you, I watched the video of the explosion there and thought “Wow…that can’t be good”. But how “not good” is the situation there? Well, there we wade into incredibly murky waters. Most of the news services reporting on the story are shoving out facts as quickly as they can, free of useful context. Their stories are often contradicted by facts that come out minutes or hours later. Meanwhile, virtually every news service has rounded up an “expert” or two – some of whom, like the man quoted in this ABC News story, doesn’t appear to have any real experience in nuclear physics beyond advocacy and policy work. What has resulted are stories like this one from Reuters, that draws unfair comparisons to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl before we have enough facts to decide whether such comparisons are apt. The networks are hustling to catch up to events, but their idea of news coverage involves sending celebrity anchors like Anderson Cooper and Christiana Amanpour (via mediagazer). No doubt you’ll see a lot of concerned faces and hear an earful of serious rhetoric, but you probably won’t get much solid reporting. The answer to the question I asked in the last paragraph is, “We really don’t know, and we’re not likely to know until the media stops running around like a chicken with its head cut off and starts doing some calm, professional work”. Let me give you an example. Here is a post from Al Jazeera’s live blog of the disaster:
Okay, so what? How elevated were those levels? Where do the elevated levels compare to a deadly level of radiation? There is no context here and, as a result, we don’t know whether this is worrisome news or an outright disaster. I suggest news outlets get the guy who wrote this blog post on just how much radiation is dangerous to humans on the phone (via Jonah Goldberg). Then, they could compare the estimated dosage of radiation in the containment building to what we receive in a routine year. They could explain to us that there are different types of meltdowns, then tell us where this one (if it is, indeed a meltdown) fits. They could explain the difference between a precautionary evacuation and one caused by necessity. They could stop relying on think-tank “scholars” sitting in an office somewhere, and get some actual nuclear technicians to tell us how reactors work and what the likely dangers are. Admittedly, getting the story right is more difficult than throwing scraps of information and a few sound bytes by “scholars” at us, but what do I know? I’m just some guy who thinks that journalism ain’t rocket-science.
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