I remember when CNN had a "Science" category. Since its dissolution a few years ago, the quality of CNN's news page has (in my opinion) gone down considerably.
Take its definition of "breaking news", for instance - since when did "that girl from The Parent Trap gets out of jail early" and "daughter of I'm-totally-qualified-to-be-President and fiance split... again" qualify? But perhaps I'm in the minority who thinks that such articles belong in People and the like rather than blazoned on CNN's front page. Even their tech and health sections, it seems, have been dumbed-down and filled with more opinions than facts.
Other news sources aren't exempt from the curse of online news reporting and our "need to know NOW" society. Many seem to have also forgotten (or have ignored) the need for editors, or the fact that the internet gives us access to thousands of bits of data and it can take as few as 2 seconds to double-check a fact. For example, Discovery News recently posted an article on the tiger extinction crisis. When it was first posted, the second sentence read "...Jasmine's pet tiger in 'The Lion King'..." It was fixed quickly enough but I would argue that it's a mistake that should never have been made. But maybe that's just the part of me that grew up on Disney. Or the cynical part that expects a news service to, you know, have accurate facts in its news. That article also states (still - I just re-read it) that "The Amur tiger, or white Siberian tiger..." Um, no. While people do (sadly) tend to think that white tiger = lives in snow, this is another "fact" that can be researched in under 2 seconds in this Glorious Age of the Internet.
And don't get me started on the Facebook "social plugins" plastered everywhere!
Apologies if this is too critical/cynical and that it has nothing to do with veterinary medicine. Sometimes you've just got to rant!
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