by Carolyn Gramling Thursday, January 5, 2012
As you would expect, there's been tons of coverage of the earthquake off the coast of Chile and the resulting tsunami in the mainstream media. And some of it has been notoriously poor.
In addition to Rick Sanchez of CNN, who took serious and well-deserved heat (and not just from Comedy Central's the Daily Show) for his extremely shouty "nine meters is what now in English?" schtick, a number of geoblogs, including geotripper and Magma Cum Laude, have pointed out the extreme annoyingness of less flashy but still misleading stories like this and this, which imply that NOAA's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center should hang its head in shame for issuing a tsunami warning for Hawaii, since the waves that did arrive were much smaller than they could have been.
Anyway. I recommend checking out this blog post from goodSchist, which highlights some of the more egregious offenders when it comes to this particular earthquake/tsunami story.
But! By no means is it entirely bleak out there. There are other news outlets (obviously we include ourselves) that do bother to find a good geologist to explain what's going on.
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