May 31, 2013 - 8:30 PM CDT - The tornado outbreak in the nation's midsection today caused a lot of panic, and news rooms were not immune. A bogus report of "mass casualties" at a Holiday Inn in Earth City, Missouri by a Fox News affiliate today worried a lot of people unnecessarily.
There was also the bogus report of people trapped under rubble at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, which also must have frightened a lot of people. Fox is not the only media outlet today to pass along outlandishly bad information. AccuWeather and
KMOV St. Louis were also guilty of horrifically irresponsible journalism. It's as though these "journalists" were more concerned with beating their competition to publish online than they were with actually confirming what it was they were reporting. The end result was not journalism, but nothing more than bad gossip.
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| It was a frustrating day on Twitter |
Sharing the blame, however, are all of the gullible idiots on Twitter who mindlessly re-tweeted the bad reports. They are the kind of morons who lack any critical thinking abilities and are too lazy to take a moment to confirm something they see online.
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| Okay, but WHICH "local news sources? |
They're the kind of fools who just love bad gossip and eagerly pass it along. Dozens of people were tweeting the Holiday Inn rumor, with no link to any source. It got so bad that Chicago News Bench tweeted this: "KMOV TV has NOTHING about a "mass casualty" event at a Holiday Inn. PEOPLE, CITE YOUR SOURCES OR SHUT THE F--- UP" (
@chinewsbench).
A great post at Ryot.org details the making of
the false Holiday Inn mass casualty story:
