With what will surely be known as one of the most baffling, awful years in recent history finally coming to a merciful end, I figured I’d wrap things up with a (very) short list of the 2016’s biggest cowards, at least according to me, and presented in no particular order:
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#10 – “There Was An Emergency Preparedness Drill/Exercise Nearby”
Mentioned no fewer than three times in Nobody Died At Sandy Hook, FEMA’s “Planning for the Needs of Children in Disasters” is repeatedly mischaracterized as either a “drill” or an “exercise.” In reality, it’s a six-hour independent study course based on materials from this Save the Children document. While FEMA offers the course online, some state organizations occasionally teach it in a classroom environment—which, for the record, looks a lot more like this:
…than this:
If you have even a passing familiarity with reality, you may notice a couple of differences!
Read More →Disgraced former professor James Tracy—fired from Florida Atlantic University for using university resources to spread disinformation and then lying about it—spends much of this chapter obsessing over the routine errors and inconsistencies that inevitably appear in breaking news coverage. This is an old, well-documented phenomenon, one only exacerbated by the 24-hour news cycle. These kinds of reporting mistakes are so commonplace that entire books have been written about them, including Howard Rosenberg’s No Time to Think and Craig Silverman’s Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech. If this reality still surprises Tracy, he is very much in the minority.
Rather than belabor the obvious—that misinformation flourishes in the chaos of early reporting—I will focus my fact-checking on claims that do not rely exclusively on those initial, error-prone reports. Exceptions will be made when necessary, or when a claim is so egregious that it demands attention regardless.
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