Comment by taejo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taejo | Hacker News Reader

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The OP seems to be at the end of a long chain of broken telephone. The 19 February 2020 press release from the institute doing the dig doesn't say anything about cars [1]. The 21 February 2020 article in Metro [2] correctly states that glyptodonts could grow to the size of a VW Beetle, but leaves out that it's not this species of glyptodont and certainly not these specimens (it also incorrectly calls glyptodonts a genus; the specimens here are in the genus Glyptodon but the largest in the subfamily Glyptodontinae are Doedicurus clavicaudatus). The mixing up of these specimens with the largest ones makes it into the headline.

1. https://www.conicet.gov.ar/hallan-cuatro-gliptodontes-en-la-...

2. https://metro.co.uk/2020/02/21/ancient-armadillo-size-car-di...

> The mixing up of these specimens with the largest ones makes it into the headline.

Where were the editors in all of this? Did no one person look at both the headline and the photo?

The editors had OKRs that had key results driven by money metrics. What did you expect the result would be?

Good point. How could one possibly notice this if you have to ever consider money? It's impossible.

> Where were the editors in all of this?

Their salaries were redirected to google's ad network employees.

The editor is listed at the end of the article, and in an ideal world would have corrected the error by now, if not before publication. I know what role editors used to play in journalism, but I'm honestly not too sure what they do these days. Write headlines, I guess. Look for the little red squiggly lines beneath misspelled words, and occasionally stir themselves to correct them. And someone has to press 'publish' on the CMS, might as well be them.

I'm even less sure whether the traditional fact checking role still exists; it doesn't seem to!

I think it’s - “Write catchy headlines and get more page-views” now.

So the real title of the article was "Argentinian Farmer Finds Family of 20k-Year-Old Car-Sized Armadillos Purple Monkey Dishwasher"

In a few minutes of searching I couldn't find any report in English that doesn't have this error.

This says everything we need to know about how centralized the media is. There is zero diversity. A single source drowns out competition

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