'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

We Know Nothing

 We live in an era when what you see or hear on the news is almost always incomplete, often to the point of it being wrong. It has become necessary to tune in to a number of different news outlets if you want to know what anything is about.

This is sometimes due to 'the agenda' of the broadcasters, but as often as not it is simply badly researched and sloppily put together. The reporting of the Afghan and Iraqi wars is a case where I believe the public are being deliberately mislead by being constantly told of the casualties from road and car bombs, without being advised of the progress that the allied forces are making in their fight against the Taliban and the insurgents. The broadcasters agenda is to see us withdraw from these theatres of war asap and consequently they are almost reporting these wars as if they were on the other side. After all, it would be unthinkable if GWB's 'surge' was to have some success, wouldn't it?

A case of downright sloppiness was evidenced by a recent story of the finding of a planet in another solar system which may contain life. One TV news source reported that this planet is too far away for us to see what it looks like, but scientists believe that it may contain water and that it is far closer to it's sun than we are to ours, but then it's sun is not so strong. The planet is also a lot larger (about five times the size) than ours and so any life that there is would likely be physically far flatter than life is on our planet.

CNN, on the other hand, while reporting that a planet with the potential for life had been found mentioned none, and I do mean none of these facts but did say that it is called C528, or something similar, and perhaps we are called C528 by the life forms on that planet, while perhaps they call their own planet 'earth' as we do. They also showed a picture of this far away globe, without explaining as the other TV station had done, that the planet cannot actually be seen, and that this was just a 'visualisation'. Anyone watching CNN would therefore have assumed that this was what the planet looked like.

Neither channel said what galaxy this planet is in or how many light years away it is, but then CNN having so far provided virtually nothing but misinformation, came out with the very salient fact that it's surface temperature seems to range from  0 degrees centigrade aprox, to about 40 degrees centigrade aprox,  making it pretty much ideal for life as we know it, with a high potential for water. This reasoning was something that the other broadcaster had completely failed to mention

By now we have seen how both stations had failed to properly report the story, and CNN in one instance, had misreported it. 

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