A 1 in 1,000 year event does not mean what reporters think it means
The media, again, does not understand what a 1 in 100 or 1,000 year storm means.
Education: Privilege and entitlement
The arrogant, entitled, self absorbed, narcissistic elite think trashing universities will end the war in Gaza.
Fact check: Snopes says Covid lab origin is a conspiracy theory, and claims they never said that
Funny – fact checker Snopes said in the past that a Covid lab origin was a conspiracy theory, then one of their fact checkers denies they ever said that.
Media myth: The “world’s happiest country” myth is now the basis for follow on stories
The “world’s happiest country” myth lives on year after year after year. Finland now pretends it knows why it was identified as “the world’s happiest country”. In fact, the metrics used to determine “happiest” have nothing to do with happiest. The “happiest” title was promoted as sounding better than a metric that measured “well-being” based on things having nothing to do with happiness!
Journalism
Nothing like being off by 1000x.
Media: Demographics – Who works in the media?
Interesting demographics of journalists. About 77% have a degree is the arts or humanities, much higher than the overall population of degree holders. Fewer have a Master’s degree than in many other fields. Journalism pay is not very good.
Climate: How the media reported on tropical storm Hilary in California
The spin began with “deadly”, “life threatening”, “catastrophic” speculation, then followed that afterwards with “It wasn’t that bad”, and stories saying the tropical storm was 100% caused by the Global Boiling ClimateCrisis, and then a few adding historical context of past tropical storms and even a hurricane.
Crazy: The U.S. Racial Classification System is Nonsensical
In 1977, the US decided to classify people by race. We decided the world was made up of 4 “races” and 1 “ethnicity”. An indigenous heritage person in North America is “Native American”, but an indigenous person in South America is …. Hispanic. People in Korea, Japan, Singapore, Pakistan, India and more are “Asian” “race”, which makes no sense. And many people are of mixed racial heritage (including my family) – but oddly, even if only a tiny part of the heritage is an ethnic group, it is legal to declare yourself part of that group. As the interviewed professor notes, it is now possible for a majority of the U.S. population to qualify as a “minority owned business”. That’s funny when a majority can qualify as a minority 🙂 It is a big mess that was news to me as I had not thought about these issues before.
Spin: Why misinformation didn’t wreck the midterms
Two years ago, we were told by multiple “sides” that misinformation and disinformation on social media threw election results. Two years later, oddly, everyone is pretending the same misinformation and disinformation no longer is an issue – which is not very believable. And then spin: “The amount of content we saw that you could call kind of election disinformation was actually larger than what we saw in 2020 — but overall, the effects were much more muted,” Source: Why misinformation…
Do accurate details matter in forming an argument?
NPR reporter bungles simple facts to make her argument.