dinosaurs

ghent

Today’s annoyance: journalists who write that dinosaurs went extinct.

I’ve just come across that lie in the science section of the BBC website (“the dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago”). I can understand why many people can’t keep themselves informed: there’s this thing called life and that’s fair enough. However, being informed is at the core of journalism, so when a journalist claims that dinosaurs went extinct, that journalist is admitting they’re crap at their job.

If they write one piece of ignorant bollocks, then anything else they say might be ignorant bollocks too. That journalist simply can’t be trusted.

I’m not talking about deliberately lying; that’s a quite different journalistic skill.

PS For anyone who spent the last twenty years hidden in a box, birds are dinosaurs.