More Bad Reporting (I'm Looking At You CNN)

Okay, one final, final note on sloppy reporting for today. On today's “American Morning” on CNN, they did a little story about how 8-to-12-year olds were becoming the “face” of the site Facebook – since there are now 7.5 million Facebook users in that age bracket. Ok, 7.5 million sounds like a lot, but not when you compare it to Facebook's total user base of roughly 500 million people, then 7.5 million works out to be a whopping 1.5% of all users. This is about the same as saying that elderly Hawaiians are the “face” of the United States of America.

I can only assume that no one on the “American Morning” staff either bothered to take 30 seconds to do the math or even knew how many Facebook users there were in the first place. It reminded me of this piece from the satirical newspaper The Onion from a few years ago about Ted Turner sending himself back in time to prevent the TimeWarner/AOL, which was suppose to vault CNN into the age of "new media". If only Ted, if only...