CNN runs bogus story saying asteroid has 1 in 2.04 odds of destroying Earth

http://ksj.mit.edu/tracker/2014/05/oops-cnn-runs-bogus-story-saying-asteroi

by libovness • 12 years ago

22 12 12 years ago

ksj.mit.edu

leorocky2• 12 years ago

The post is from iReports, which is apparently an experiment in citizen journalism. CNN lets random people with no qualifications post stories under the CNN banner.

The title is wrong. It should be some user submitted a bogus story on iReport which is par for the course. CNN does not edit iReport. The author of this blog post must not know this. There's nothing to see here. CNN published no such story.

mrcharles2• 12 years ago

Yup. Unpaid crowdsourced unverified 'news' is all that ireport.cnn.com does, and apparently a majority of the internet can't distinguish that kind of garbage from actual reporting.

Maybe it says something about CNN, but it probably says more about the people willing to read an obviously flawed and false article and then act like it was "reported" by some kind of authority.

leorocky2• 12 years ago

There's nothing but spam, trash and even a test post:

http://ireport.cnn.com/recent-updates.jspa

I don't even know how this post made it to the front page.

adsr• 12 years ago

It's published under the CNN name, which lends a whole lot of credibility to the story. Even if CNN is not taking responsibility they probably should, and this incident is a good illustration of why.

haberman• 12 years ago

The screen grab clearly shows the CNN logo at the top of the story. CNN has exclusive rights to the trademark and allowed it to be used as a banner for the story.

It is true that the sidebar says "not vetted for CNN," but this is perhaps too subtle of a warning given the complete lack of vetting.

libovness• 12 years ago

It says a lot about CNN. iReports has the CNN logo on it. CNN has been dipping its toe — its whole foot, actually — into "breaking news" that is not actually breaking, misleading headlines, and low-brow flotsam.

Maybe iReport is a good idea but only if it produces genuine news. If not, then maybe it's a failed experiment.

mikeyouse• 12 years ago

This is similar to how Forbes is behaving lately. Most of the articles on the 'Forbes' domain name are just citizen journalism and thinly veiled PR pieces. I can't believe they (CNN and Forbes both) are okay with that type of brand dilution purely to aggregate terrible content.

GHFigs• 12 years ago

They're okay with it because the competition (e.g. Huffington Post, Business Insider, BuzzFeed) built their brands on aggregating terrible content. It works.

fjabre• 12 years ago

The story is correct. They just have the date wrong.

mrcharles2• 12 years ago

[CITATION NEEDED]

astrodust• 12 years ago

The odds of the asteroid destroying Earth are the same as their being a March 35th.

tfederman• 12 years ago

To be fair, most of CNN's budget goes to advancing holography science, not astrophysics or investigating/analyzing news.

CNN runs bogus story saying asteroid has 1 in 2.04 odds of destroying Earth

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