A while ago I was browsing websites when I came across this image, a screencapture of a live Fox News broadcast. It should go without saying that the country in between Syria and Iran is in fact Iraq, not Egypt. I submitted it without hesitation to failblog.org who have now published it.
Reading through the comments, one thing shocks me completely. This comment:
Curbie says:
I hate to do this, because there is obviously a lot of hate for fox news here, but they were probably high lighting those two regions by magnifying or enlarging them on the map. I’ve seen every single news source do this, not just fox news. This was just a creative, convenient screen capture for the person who submitted this. That is all.
I had to read it several times before I could come to terms with how many ways this fails in itself. In fact, it made me quite sad, because this poster appears to be serious. First he says that there is a lot of hate for fox news (he’s evidently an avid viewer and dislikes seeing the site ridiculed) and goes on to talk about the highlighting. Yes, he’s quite correct, news sources do indeed – and have here – highlight countries they are specifically talking about – but that wasn’t the reason this was posted, and the fact that he can’t even spot that the country in between those two highlighted groups of countries is wrongly named is extremely sad.
There are a few accusations that the picture is photoshopped; it was not. Fox News broadcast that Iraq is actually Egypt. While it’s sad enough that such a mistake made it through to broadcast, it’s even sadder that some people would criticize the screengrab for being hatred towards the news station that broadcast it and of being edited, and yet not spot the actual problem.
What is the world coming to? Is this the state of American education nowadays?