Except when it’s tragic, it’s funny to see news organizations caught with their pants down when they didn’t bother to check on the truthfulness of stories they report. The news organizations decide that the story is good enough that it ought to be reported without any effort to verify it or even check to see if it makes sense. We saw this back in August when The Chive’s Dry Erase Board Girl pretended to be quitting from from her job as a stock broker’s assistant.
Well, as you might have guessed, it’s happened again. This time Fox News bit on the story that the Los Angeles Police Department was going to buy 10,000 new jetpacks at a cost of $100,000 each. Aside from the craziness of the LAPD jumping into the whole jet pack thing, did anyone bother to do the math? That would be a billion dollars on jet packs. A quickee look online shows that the the LAPD has an annual budget in the range of $1.2 billion, this just isn’t so. But, hey, why let details get in the way of a good story? To their credit, Fox had a correction on the air within 40 minutes. (By the way, this is more a critique of cable news in general than Fox in particular….)
By the way, if you were hoping for the indie band We Were Promised Jetpacks, this is for you:
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