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Moon Hoax again on public TV
Posted by Michael on 10 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: italy, space, television
I’ve covered this topic before but it looks like there’s no end to the shameless audience hunting by means of sacrificing culture, perpetrated by the italian public service television, RAI.
Once again, I borrow the words of my friend and science communicator Paolo Amoroso, on his blog.
“RAI neglects science for the sake of audience”
[…]
“A waste of public money for shows that deny the genuinity of the Apollo lunar landings”
[…]
“In the march 3rd episode of the show ‘Voyager’ RAI gives free speech to the conspiracy theory ramblings”
[…]
“Roberto Giacobbo (hosts) Voyager, a TV show for everything misterious….for a 8 years old child!”
But there’s more. A friend and fellow partecipant in the italian Forum “Forumastronautico” noted and commented on every error and misconception presented in the shameful show, an impressive display of ignorance (or, more likely, lucid exploitation of the public ignorance) that totals an astounding rate of one error every 36 seconds of show. Enjoy (in Italian, sorry)
Makes me even happier for not owning a TV .
Stay tuned, more to come.
Italian newspaper with mixed up ideas about space
Posted by Michael on 28 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: massmedia, italy, space
I learn from my friend Alessandro (http://csidnc.altervista.org/blog.php?entry=entry070824-144120) that there is no end to the ridiculous.
On Friday the 24th, the local pages of La Stampa, a national available italian newspaper, had an interesting mini-article about a mysterious “Orbital Lunar Observatory“.
You can read the article below, of course in italian. But here’s a translation.
What the hell is the “Lunar Orbital Laboratory” for crying out loud?! How on earth is one supposed to think of the ISS after reading that title?
Plus, from a source that I’m not going to name, but I encourage to post a comment, even anonymous, I learnt that the…journalist (and I think I just found an improper use of the word ‘journalist’) found out about the iss lunar transit transit some weeks ago. The ISS has manouvered since then, and the transit (not all that rare) simply didn’t occur, at least not in the ground stripe descripted in the article.
And I’m not even going to comment about the errors in the writing(but you find them in the translation).
I’d like to know who’s behind the initials R.L. Is mr. (or miss, or mrs.) R.L. too shy? Or too ashamed? La Stampa readers deserve to know who are they wasting their money on!
This is one of many examples of how the space is presented (when is presented) on the italian mass media. Kinda makes one wonder about what do they tell us when they talk about politics, war, economy, medicine, you-name-it. E.g., when it comes to Computer Science, they often oversimplify and end up changing the meaning of the news or over-inflate problems to add drama, or bash on technology. This is the same.
Two clues make an evidence?What do you think? How do the mass media cover your area of expertise? Let me know in the comments!
Stay tuned, more to come.
Aug 28th - UPDATE: well, turns out that the author defends himself by saying that the titles aren’t decided by the authors but by the editors. And I believe him because it makes sense.
But the point remains, the charge aren’t dropped, they’re just moved from R.L. to someone else. The title is wrong, the article is not precise. This is no way of doing information. No way.
Stay tuned, more to come.
Moon Hoax on public TV in Italy (shame on us)
Posted by Michael on 30 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: space, television
Yeah, like I needed something else to be ashamed of.
First of all I want to introduce to you the comment that my fellow Forumastronautico.it user and scientific divulgator Paolo Amoroso put on his blog. Sorry, it’s in Italian, but I guess the topic allows it :)
I encourage you to check out the Paolo Attivissimo (colorful) minute by minute chronicle of the shameful broadcast.
Instead of doing what a History TV program should do, that is, presenting historical truth with professional competence, this issue of “La storia siamo noi” (we’re the history) focused on presenting a collage of the childish “proofs” that some people made up to say that “geez, we never landed on the Moon!”.
Needless to say that the main reason that drives these people to insult the effort o the thousand of NASA employees and contractors is… private earning, selling books.
You can find a plethora of bibliographies on the argument, and I’m not going to help you find them because they don’t deserve a bit more of the publicity they already get.
True, RAI saved a bit of face by mildly “debunking” some of the conspirational theories, but the whole concept of the show (the title, “Apollo 11, The dark side of the Moon”, to begin with) gives too much credit on the stories told by a bunch of idiots.
Moreover, this is NOT what we pay MANDATORY subscription for. But this is part of the reason because I gave up TV at my place since early this year.
