CBS Vincidated? Media Giant Stupid, Not Dishonest In Chalko Affair

My last word on the Tom Chalko's Global Warming = More Earthquake's story (unless he responds to my email requesting further clarification of his ideas), which I am writing up only because it looks to be a slow news day.

One question that goes beyond the obvious "How could CBS (and other news outlets) have been so stupid as to publish this nonsense?" is "How did the original news release come to be tagged as coming from Associated Press?". There has been some speculation that CBS has been trying to pass the buck for their screwup.

Contrary to what I wrote yesterday, CBS does format material from from the news wires, including Associated Press, in a unique fashion. For example, byline and other location information at the beginning of an AP piece is cut from the story and replaced with the "(AP)" symbol. Furthermore, at the end of the article CBS inserts a slightly non-standard bit of boilerplate about not reproducing, rebroadcasting AP material. They use roman numerals for example (MMVIII), where AP does not . Nor do other news sources, as far as I have been able to determine, reformat material from AP in this way.

Now, perhaps because Marketwire is a Canadian-based service, you don't find too many releases from it appearing on the CBS website. In fact, I have been unable to find any. I suspect their origonal release re Chalko was incorrectly reformatted by CBS as being from AP and later incorrectly attributed to AP on that basis. No perfidy, just stupidity, in other words.

In a sense, of all the media entities associated with the Chalko story, CBS has behaved in the most professional manner. They at least have pulled the story; it is still out there, masquerading as news, on the MSNBC and G&M websites.

So there you go. I obviously need to get a life as bad as this guy.