Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Misheard in the Echo Chamber

Yesterday I turned on the news and caught a short item about tourism in Antarctica. The piece concluded with a quote attributed to a "leading scientist" bemoaning the increased tourism and saying (approximately) "we have two choices; we can bury our heads in the sand and do nothing, or we can take every possible measure to protect it".

Some scientist, I thought, a false dichotomy if I ever heard one.

So I googled up the topic today, and found the AP story that must be at the root of this. Happily, it's a tour operator who said it, not a "scientist", and the wording is less dramatic:

But David Bowen of Toronto-based GAP Adventures say tourism is unstoppable.

"People are going to travel to Antarctica, there's no doubt about it," he said. "We have two choices: we can put our heads in the sand and forget about it because it could damage the place, or we can go there and do the best we can at preserving it."

It's funny how a story like this kind of makes the rounds. I remember seeing similar stories on multiple networks simultaneously. There's no reason to cover it at that particular moment, but everyone does. Do TV news reporters pull this stuff off AP to fill 15 seconds?

It's much less amusing that the quote was mangled and misattributed.

Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at April 11, 2004 09:40 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links