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 subsequently lying about it, spends much of this chapter fixated on the typical errors and inconsistencies that surface in breaking news reports—an age-old issue only magnified by the 24-hour news cycle. Such reporting slip-ups are so common that entire books have been written on the subject, 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 these surprises still shock Tracy, he’s in the clear minority.
Rather than waste time on the glaringly obvious—that misinformation thrives in chaotic early reporting—I’ll focus my fact-checking on claims that aren’t solely rooted in those early, flawed reports. I’ll make exceptions when necessary or when the claims are particularly egregious.
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