Re: [NEWS] "Thomas Bushnell Leaves HURD"

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Sat, Nov 22, 2003 at 11:58:33AM +0200, ogi@fmi.uni-sofia.bg wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 21, 2003 at 01:43:28PM +0200, Ognyan Kulev wrote:
> > This is strictly an internal GNU struggle, and has no relevance at all on
> > anything except how GNU is organized and what it means to be a GNU
> > maintainer.  In particular, Thomas did _not_ get "dismissed from the HURD
> > project" [sic], nor is it true that "Thomas leaves HURD" [sic].
> 
> I'm glad that it's not that bad as it sounds when written and commented in
> the news :-)

Well, the objective of "the news" is to publish something every day.  If
that means copying rumors that sound interesting from other "news media",
then that's ok, even if that means that your "story" is made of wrongness
and irrelevance.  In other words, ignorance has rarely stopped something
from being published, nor does ignorance stop certain people from
commenting.  Sometimes its worse than it sounds, sometimes not at all.  You
have to apply your own scrutiny and judge the quality of the presented
material (what sources are given? etc).

In particular, nobody involved and who knew the facts had been even asked
about it, and this is obvious from the content of these "reports" when you
consider what is said, and more importantly, what is not said.  The most
important thing to learn from this is that the majority of things published
in news media, be it online, print or TV, is not researched or investigated,
but cut and pasted from press releases, press agencies, or simply other news
media.  That this has a devastating effect on the quality of the "fourth power
in state" is apparent all around you (and you can think of the other
consequences to society yourself).

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU      http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus Brinkmann              The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/