21 April 2008...20:17
Continue the narrative, to hell with facts
Wrong once, shame on you. Wrong twice, shame on you again. You can’t fool me anyway.
The New York Times last week reported falsely that there had been violent protests in Thailand over food prices. There have been no violent protests about food in Thailand. There haven’t been any violent protests about anything in Thailand, period, for quite a few years.
Today, The New York Times has a piece on how people who thought they were against genetic modification of food are discovering that between GM crops and expensive food, they’ll take the GM products. It’s an interesting piece until all of a sudden it smacks your eyeballs with:
The pressure to re-evaluate biotech comes as prices of some staples like rice and wheat have doubled in the last few months, provoking violent protests in several countries including Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti and Thailand.
No. There haven’t been any violent protests in Thailand about food or anything else. I was going to put a caption on the photo about how it showed people rioting in a Bangkok supermarket, but these days irony goes over so many heads. It is people in a Bangkok supermarket, though, and like all the other people in Thailand, they are not rioting either.
The repetition of this silly error appears to be a case of picking up a story from The New York Times by a reporter from The New York Times, who can’t be bothered to do simple, fact-checking research for his own story. Bad job, Andrew Pollack. Really bad.
2 Comments
23 April 2008 at 23:57
[...] According to the media, Japan is having a food shortage as well. But according to people in Japan, there is plenty of food. Same in Thailand: Bogus reports of riots due to food shortages. [...]
4 May 2008 at 8:55
[...] happen. Four days later, The New York Times, this time in a report written in New York, again reports food riots which didn’t happen in Thailand. Then our French friends at the national news agency AFP [...]
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