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April 16, 2007
Factless reporting about a pilotless plane
Tom L. writes:
Thought you all might appreciate this item from today's Aviation Week & Space Technology's "Ares Defense Technology Blog." The author of this blog entry is Bill Sweetman, who is among the preeminent aviation and military technology writers in the world. Apparently, in their Sunday profile of General Atomics (builder of the Predator and a number of other UAV/UCAVs) the New York Times got some facts very wrong, and throws in some laughers for good measure. Now as a self professed aviation geek, this sort of stuff gets me goosed all the time, but, like Sweetman alludes to, the mistakes made in this article were beyond the pale and easily findable/correctable if the Times' fact checker simply bothered to spend ten or so minutes on Google before giving the article a pass.
As Sweetman says, "If you really want to get your credibility above the Jayson Blair level, maybe you should assign aerospace stories to someone who knows the difference between a propeller and a jet....This is not war-geek nitpicking: the NYT would never, ever make such errors concerning something that they gave a rodent's rear end about, like the latest Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit, or allegations of unspecified wrongdoing by the third cousin three times removed of a former deputy assistant White House aide."
Posted by bill at April 16, 2007 11:49 AM
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