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aegiso

Spelling errors? Check.

Bad grammar? Check.

Inconsistent formatting? Check.

Technical inaccuracies? Check.

Making up terminology (e-note)? Yep.

I've never once watched Fox News, but I've heard stories about their quality of reporting. Now I understand.

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I don't really see what this has to do with Fox News. Lack of research, investigation, verification, education, accuracy, grammar, formatting, spelling, and truth are all endemic to all reporting/anchoring/journalism, these days.

These days?

I think it's the bit where they created that graphic and broadcast it on air. I'm pretty sure that's the link with Fox News.

It's also not Fox News - it's Fox Business, which has a partially separate staff.

Don't you know? If a Fox-related outlet does something funny, it's special because we don't agree with their political leanings. cd groupthink && ./mock && ./ridicule.

It has nothing to do with Fox News. Television news across the board is a vehicle to sell advertising. While there's still some component that tries to be informative, it's mostly about attracting and holding an audience being entertaining or dramatic, like any other television programming. This is why previously unremarkable occurrences such as hot weather in August are now reported like airplane crashes.

Given that audiences have an ever-increasing SMS-, Twitter-, and Facebook-molded attention span, you are expecting the impossible to expect that television news will ever provide more than a cursory overview of anything.

The on-air presenters in most if not all cases are NOT experts at what they are reporting. They are selected based on their looks, personality, and ability to read a teleprompter without. sounding. like. they. are. reading.

But you also have to remember that news networks like Fox and CNN have to fill 24 hours a day, under intense pressure to be the first on-air with reports of "breaking news." So they can't spend a lot of time fact-checking and polishing every story. This is quite unlike the previous generation network "evening news" shows which were 30 minutes once a day and they could spend all day honing and checking the content of that 30 minutes.

Bottom line, if you want to be informed about anything, don't watch television news. Seek out longer form reporting by subject matter experts (easier than ever to find online) or go straight to the source (in this case, help.github.com would be good).

Getting upset or indignant about this is a waste of energy.

Here's what this has to do with Fox.

The Fox network has proven themselves to be anti-science, anti-reason and anti-intellectual. In their alternate reality, there is no global warming, there were WMDs in Iraq, and the financial crisis was caused by poor people.

The GitHub story just reinforces the notion that facts and analysis (and spelling) don't matter much in that organization.

This has less to do with left-right political leanings and more to do with reasoning about the world rationally, instead of ideologically.

And it's presented in a visual quality - mimicking the "act as if" sentiment - which is enough to make some people trust it as a source of information.

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