Brian's quite remarkable blog of wonder.

I try not to work myself in too much of a tizzy over how atrocious the American news media are, but seriously. Today I was watching CNN and they were reporting on weather predictions this year from the Farmer's Almanac, which apparently predicted Hurricane Katrina with a margin of error of a few days. This, of course, means to illiterate network producers that this book's predictions - which are made two years in advance and are based on lunar cycles, sunspots and positions of the planets - are to be reported as scientific fact. They interviewed the Almanac's editor, who authoritatively made the dubious and nebulously-worded claim that her book has an accuracy rate of 85% (never mind that most major hurricanes take place within a couple weeks of Labor Day). I had to get closer to my TV screen to make sure it was the CNN logo I was seeing and not the CBN logo.

While I'm railing about CNN... I can stand product placement in movies and TV shows, in fact, I usually enjoy it for how ridiculously disjunct it usually is. But during coverage of serious natural disasters, when a field reporter asks a cameraman to zoom in on a Comfort Inn sign, then comments on how much he likes the hotel chain, and spends thirty seconds reporting on the structural integrity of the sign, I get the urge to switch to Fox News, where at least my expectations are actually low enough to be occasionally met.

So in conclusion, mass media sucks. Oh yeah, and I fucking hate Comfort Inn.