Never, Ever leave a reporter in a room alone, with a number

Never, Ever leave a reporter in a room alone, with a number

Sheer idiocy to have written this:

The “baby boom” is officially defined as those born from 1946 to 1964.

Per the above, in the year 2060, the aging baby boomer population will be aged 96 to 114, and apparently life spans will have increased by decades by the year 2060.

The study is not accessible to the public. The reporter who wrote this article and the editor who let this fly by are idiots. In a literal sense, the baby boom population will, of course age, and be mostly dead by 2060, and per the model, Alzheimer’s disease incidence will double. But the those two facts are not related! The reporter created a logical fallacy to imply there is a linkage.

Public opinion is formed by this sort of stupidity in reporting. When they can’t get the simple things correct (like the illogical reference to baby boomers) how can we trust them with complex parts of a story?

Obviously, it has not been a good week for the media. The proper response is to be more diligent than ever – instead, the media (ABC, Reuters, Bloomberg,  and CBS (false subpoena story), CNN and CNN’s correction (false Wikileaks story), Washington Post reporter’s admitted fake photo, and MSNBC) launched significant false reports in the past week, harming confidence in the media even more. The week before, long time reporters and TV hosts Charlies Rose (PBS) and Matt Lauer (NBC) were fired for sexual harassment and worse – plus others earlier in the year including Bill O’reilly (FOX).

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