Second Anthrax victim in same location; building shut down.

I don't know if anybody has heard this, but I heard a report (I can't remember which, it might have been Fox radio) saying that the U.S. had hit a cave or something and it caused damage several feet down. Is this true!?

 

We're probably going to hit a lot of caves, RM. And anything underground will get penetrators. They became pretty standard weapons after the Gulf War.

 

Hmmm, looks like we're going to get a lot of cases of the media rushing to conclusions. The good thing is that it will keep people on alert, the bad thing is it could induce a panic.

 

There was NO case in Virginia. A man admitted himself to a hospital in VA saying he had anthrax. Turns out, he has pneumonia and NO anthrax.

This is a CLASSIC case of media hype getting out of control. Every source is reported whether or not it is credible. It looks like, now, it was a Hispanic employee and was done as some sort of prank, not a terrorist attack. There are even suggestions he is a disgruntled employee.

I love the media. That's it, no more news for me.

 

You can count me in Jeff! You just can't take this stuff seriously anymore. First they report a hijacking as if it was fact, now this anthrax scare. And I can't believe idiots are pulling pranks. These people pulling pranks should get the same penalty that people get for threatening someone or inducing a riot, or whatever.

 

Yeah, that VA stuff was bogus, BUT they were worried about him having it and he was tested thoroughly. I think they said he had worked some at the AMI building, but I could be mistaken.

Found this article......on MSNBC:

http://msnbc.com/news/638169.asp

 

I see. So we don't believe the media when they say it's a likely attack, but we do believe them when they say it's just a prank. Makes sense...

People tend to believe what they want to believe regardless of evidence, so listening to the media probably won't make a difference.

I don't know what the investigation will turn up, but I think it's pretty clear that there weren't any infected sheep wandering around the Sun offices... This was definitely intentional. And why isn't it a terrorist attack? Because it didn't kill a hundred people? Assassinations are terrorist attacks. And this episode has alot of people scared...

 

Don't get me wrong treeman, I'm not going to freeze out the media, just be more careful. But it gets annoying when they're throwing out news without completely confirming it, only so that they can beat out the OTHER news broadcast. It would be nice if they were more careful.

 

I always see those bumper stickers saying, "Don't Trust the Biased Liberal Media." What now?

For the record, I never said that I believed these reports. I have been skeptical from the beginning with everything that is reported. I am hyper critical of the media because I know lots of members of it and because my wife was one.

They ALWAYS hype thing out of proportion.

 

Jeff,

You're right to be critical of the media. They DO blow things out of proportion. Hell, for about two months there the only news you could get from the national outlets was on the Chandra Levy case... Not a peep about Saddam or Osama.

And they do have a tendency to report just any old snippet they hear in the hope that they will be the first to break a story. I really don't understand that myself, since they're all watching each other and each break the same story within 5 minutes of each other. They usually try to get confirmation before they do, but sometimes there's only one source, and sometimes a source is inaccurate.

That said, not everything they report is innacurate - most of it is at least partially true. A good portion of it is right on the money. And frankly, I'd be more worried if they didn't report everything they heard. I'm not a big fan of censorship, even self-inflicted. I think a free press has a duty to do it that way.

BTW, I've always thought that the idea of a biased liberal media was ridiculous. Reporters may be biased, but the media is pretty impartial.

 

The problem is that the media, with the new technologies (internet, cable, wireless, satellite, etc), has to rush everything to air or print. They don't take time verifying their sources or double checking the facts. The "feature" story is a thing of the past with the exception of 60 Minutes and NPR, both of whom are fairly biased to the left.

The issue for me is that every story is multi-dimensional. It is NEVER cut and dried, black and white. But, the media does not have the time or the desire to get every fact and make sure they got everything correct. In the business, it is more important who gets there first even if they are incorrect because it is not as much about reliability as it is how quickly a story gets released. People's careers are made and broken on the speed with which they get a story on the air or in the press.

The last major conflict of this type was the Gulf War. At the time, there was no intenet (Al Gore hadn't invented it yet. ) so we were all blown away by the CNN coverage of smart bombs going down smokestacks, etc. It wasn't until later that we found out that much of what we saw was set up for the media by the military. The stuff on the ground that we didn't hear about until later was the newsworthy stuff, but it was buried.

The military learned from its experience in Vietnam that you don't allow you enemy to look sympathetic and they kept the media at arms length in the Gulf.

Now, the media has the demands of not only watchers and listeners but those on the net. We want our info faster than ever and the Clinton scandal helped to demonstrate that the public wants its news more scandalous than ever. Reality based shows on TV like COPS and When Animals Attack mean journalists have to make the news appear faster and look more sensational than ever before.

The problem is that is not good journalism. When local news on tv is dominated by breast implants, sex offenders and entertainment "news" and when shows like Extra and Entertainment Tonight try to act like news outlets and scoop the big three, something is seriously wrong.

 

The bottomline is that we of the ignorant masses get exactly what we ask for.

People love "real life soap operas" like Levy/Condit and Clinton,the intern, and impeachment...I'm not saying those guys do not deserve to be condemned...but the hype, the hype will always be there because the viewers will be there.

The great thing is that those of us who want the truth have a number of media through which to obtain it today, inexpensively.

I see this issue just as I see politics. You can sit back and not learn or you can be an active participant.

Term limits, campaign finance reform are tools of the lazy.

 

I understand and sympathize with your gripes against the media - I think you're right. I also feel that 99 times out of 100 they should get the facts and details before releasing a story. But when it's potentially this big, I can understand why they wouldn't want to wait.

However, I think that we should probably blame the viewers for much of this. If we as a group don't have the patience to wait for an accurate story, then why should the media try excessively hard to give us one? They are more inclined to entertain us than they are to inform us, because that is what the ratings and their research tells them we want.

Ideally, they can do both.

 

Trust no one...it's all a conspiracy.....

 

How was anthrax eradicated? We know diseases like smallpox and such were eradicated through use of vaccines but how did anthrax get so rare? I don't ever remember taking a vaccine for that, or is it one of those diseases that's just really, really rare like "The Elephant Man Disease"? (Sorry, I'm not sure what he had just know that it was RARE!)