Terrorism Theater at Its Finest

In keeping with the foolishness of April 1st, the hot story circulating on the Internet these days is about the supposed attempt by terrorists to insert explosives in breast and buttock implants. The story apparently originated with a Sun article published in March. Considering the Sun's penchant for sensational stories, I was a bit skeptical.

However, what is instructive is how fast and far even a silly story can spread. Maybe it spreads because it is silly. Fortunately, the Sun has given us a marker for tracking the spread of this particular story. In the story, the chemical name for the  explosive PETN is given as pentaerythritol tetrabitrate. Since the name is actually pentaerythritol tetranitrate, it's easy to spot how many bloggers picked up on the story without doing even limited fact checking. A quick Internet search shows over 3500 stories with this misspelling.

In addition, the story has found its way not only into the National Enquirer and Fox News, as one would expect, but into major newspapers and wire services around the world.

It took about a minute to track down the Sun's "terrorism expert", Joseph Farrar. Mr. Farrar is actually a journalist and editor of the WorldNet Daily, the website that "broke" the story in February, supposedly based on reports from MI5. Mr. Farrar has never claimed to be an expert on terrorism and has said he was misquoted.

The trouble with stories like these is that they contain just enough truth to make people nervous and start the folks at Homeland Security looking for new toys and techniques to counter this latest "threat". So when they surface, let's do our homework and try to stop them before they grow - we've got enough real problems without adding someone's fantasies into the mix!

But I do wonder how they planned to detonate such a device....

Comments

[Cynthia]

Okay so there's one flaw in the plan.

But seriously, if you can be serious about this kind of story, it's a sad example of what's happened to journalism in this internet age.

[Lucien Canton]

The Internet is a two-edged sword. I've seen some outstanding examples of investigative journalism but I've also seen a lot or articles that would not have been written if the "journalist" had done some simple fact checking.