LIVE: STS-124 Flight Day 4 - EVA 1 / JEM-PM installation

[Lee Jay]

LOL!!!!

How.. un-professional... can you be?!  At least check your stuff, or talk to someone "in-the-know" of what the heck is going on!  (No offense, Chris, not targeted at you, at BBC)

Maybe they should ask someone like, um, themselves.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7432466.stm

[cabbage]

The frustrating thing is that IMO much of the BBC news space coverage of late has been better (ATV docking, Phoenix landing, Discovery launch) but it shows that it is still possible to get things wrong - especially when you don't have specialists to hand (as is often the case in the middle of the night).

[JimO]

What is often invisible re news coverage is the degree to which stories are checked out 24/7/365 (and I have the phone logs to prove THAT!!) and determined to be spurious, or self-aggrandizing press releases, or mistranslations (as in yesterday's horrible AFP story about the toilet problem still possibly forcing station evacuation -- they got the TENSES wrong in the translation from the original Russian), or just oversights -- and thus never appear at all. I find that half my work at NBC is as this kind of gate-keeper, and my longevity there has allowed general knowledge of my round-the-clock availability to spread widely so folks know to call. It's not a perfect system, but I've been gratified at the professional commitment to check things out. Valuable, I hope I've been -- and I don't come cheap, but they keep reneweing my contract.

And my inbox is open to complaints from all news consumers out there who spot this stuff that needs fixing -- usually (not always) it can be modified on the website.