It didn’t take long for a bomb found at a San Francisco Starbucks to make national headlines, nor did it take long for the story to reach comedy status. I shall illustrate the comedy by summarizing three consecutive days of news coverage from local radio stations:
Day One. A pipe bomb was found inside the bathroom of a local Starbucks. Dynamite could be seen sticking out of the bomb’s casing.
Day Two. Law enforcement authorities detonated the bomb, which was housed in a flashlight casing.
Day Three. The bomb wasn’t a bomb at all, and was, quite simply, just a flashlight.
Is the reporting here the fault of the media, who, like a class clown, seeks to draw attention by coming up with the most ridiculous stories, or was their reporting appropriate given the information available. I would tend to go with the former, if only because the media is a hype machine, and always focuses on drawing the masses in with headlines aimed to probe people’s paranoia.
There’s also the beatiful technology used by bomb technicians, which in this case, used a high-powered water hose to “defuse” the “bomb”. Technology like that is stunning.
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