I'm sure most of you know this already... I've known it for a long time myself; But for some reason tonight I feel like dumping a few comments on the brutally poor quality of the "news" we get from the typical outlets.

Although I believe that often we are fed reports with deliberate skewing meant to manipulate the masses, I also believe that we have eager [pseudo professional] writers who just don't know what they're doing. It's kinda like me on virtually every topic, but I don't publish things in the New York Times.

I was reading a story from the NYT which covered the potential purchase of DoubleClick by Google. There were some ironic anti-trust comments from Microsoft and AT&T but I suppose those are expected. The part that really went over the edge was the following snippet:

"Ad-serving networks like DoubleClick place tiny programs on computers, called cookies, that monitor what sites users visit."

"[C]ookies" are real and used by ad networks but last time I checked, they were not "programs" and they could not monitor what web sites users visit. It's a little deeper than that because if you have enough reach on web sites, you can build a profile of a user by having info sent across the wire for web sites that have your 'code' included on their page(s). But that does not equate to monitoring which sites users visit and a text file (the cookie) is not known as a "program" in any circle I've run in. I could be wrong, I might need new circles, or a brain transplant with a field mouse to improve my cranial capacity.

So was it a malicious attempt to thwart Google's purchase? Was it purely lack of understanding or poor wording in an attempt simplify things for readers? Not sure.

Again, I make mistakes all the time so I'm not trying to throw stones. I'm really writing this for myself to remind that the "mainstream" media is at least corrupt, probably inept and mostly likely a deadly combination of the two. So while it's a good idea to monitor them, it is an even better idea to be skeptical of each and every word they print. It's not just semantics, despite what they might say in defense of this example.