Is a fourth grade education a requirement to be a reporter?

Apparently not. An Ecuadorian couple claimed that they live without food or water, from the "universe's energy." Numerous newspapers and highly recognized web outlets published this as unquestioned fact, including Yahoo, The Sun, The New York Post, The Independent, The Daily Mail, Metro and many others. (This story appears on CNN, so admittedly there's a bit of a pot and kettle thing going on here.)

The excuse is that it was too hard to go to Ecuador to fact check. This is a really wicked problem. Many people do not believe the news in the corporate media, which means for example that they do not believe that Russia interfered in the recent U.S. election. It is hard to explain why they should believe that and not believe this. I knew that the Bush administration's claims about "weapons of mass destruction™" in Iraq were bullshit, and I argued for that extensively on this very blog; but the New York Times was enthusiastically promoting it.

So no, you can't believe everything you read in the paper or see on TV, but you need to apply critical thinking. Not everybody is good at that, unfortunately, and once they have built up a coherent alternative reality it is very, very hard to extract them from it. In order to have a  workable consensual reality, we need a smart, knowledgeable press corps with critical thinking skills that we can depend on. We do not have that. 

The result may well be catastrophe for human civilization.

ahoo, The Sun, The New York Post, The Independent, The Daily Mail, Metro - See more at: http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/21/media/breatharian-couple-news-outlets/index.html#sthash.cU9xm4Vx.dpuf

Yahoo, The Sun, The New York Post, The Independent, The Daily Mail, Metro - See more at: http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/21/media/breatharian-couple-news-outlets/index.html#sthash.cU9xm4Vx.dpuf

Yahoo, The Sun, The New York Post, The Independent, The Daily Mail, Metro - See more at: http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/21/media/breatharian-couple-news-outlets/index.html#sthash.cU9xm4Vx.dpuf

the universe's energy