Monday, June 30, 2014

The Persistence of Myths and Cartoons

I suspect anyone who works in a given field long enough will find numerous errors and myths in the mass media depiction of the field.  This has not, I think, changed with the Internet. Whenever I go to wikipedia on some agriculture related stuff, I find errors.  If I had energy I might correct them but I don't, mostly. (For example, US agriculture says agricultural activity occurs in "most states".) Or many general statements about agricultural subsidies are wrong or misleading.

The Post's Glenn Kessler recently identified an error in the pages of the NYTimes, in columnist Tom Friedman's column.  (It took as fact Dean Rusk's comment in the Cuban missile crisis, that we were eyeball to eyeball and the other guy just blinked--not true.) 

I'm reminded of a famous cartoon, I think it was, showing a guy working late and telling his wife: 'there's something wrong on the Internet".   But the Internet is great--I just googled to find that cartoon so the link was added after I wrote.

Speaking of cartoons, I strongly recommend this book--very funny

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