Ryan's Journal

In less than twelve hours, I'll be taking my last test at MIT.

On an unrelated but probably familiar rant, I want to find a new news service. Here's CNN going at it again in an article about some 9-11 related investigation. The journalist Susan Candiotti writes, "Using satellite technology, GPS is able to locate with pinpoint accuracy any location on Earth," in reference to the fact that one of the people involved may have been recording the World Trade Center's coordinates via the global positioning system. I take issue to her panning of actual fact for the embellishment of a totally unrelated point, that GPS has 'pinpoint accuracy' - GPS is good to about a square meter, and a pinpoint is less than a square millimeter. GPS is also notoriously poor at calculating altitude.

Ms. Candiotti didn't even have to say anything about GPS. Even if she did, she certainly didn't have to describe it as being 'pinpoint accurate.' Of course, I'd be even more peeved had the whole article centered around GPS, but it's still upsetting that Ms. Candiotti decided to misinform about such a minor point. Which editor dropped the ball on this one? Speaking of which, who allows all the grammatical and spelling errors on CNN's web edition? I usually find at least one of both in every article. I really don't like or trust CNN and its subsidiary website, nor do I trust them to comprehend what the expression "just the facts" means. You know, these people couldn't even cover 9-11, due to some technical incompetence on their part - I had to turn to Slashdot and NPR for an account of what was happening.

Good reporting is so hard to find these days.

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