Sloppy journalism (as usual)

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Some reporters misunderstood a pictogram (obviously showing a flare hanging on a parachute) on an illumination mortar bomb (there's "ILLUM PARA" written on it - how dumb are those reporters?!) for a star of david and a crescent.End result: A conspiracy theory about Israeli weapons in Libya.On another note, German news reported about the crash of a U.S. warplane (A-10) with "11000" rounds of ammunition on-board (many news outlets copy-pasted the faulty dpa message).Let's look at the Spiegel news; it cites the dpa nonsense of 11000 rounds AND a much closer to reality report from a local newspaper about 1500 rounds. The Spiegel author KNEW that the figure was obviously fishy, but he DID NOT spend one minute on a quick wikipedia check in order to learn that an A-10 has a capacity for 1,174 rounds (or 1,350 if you look in the German wikipedia) and is written "A-10", not "A10".It's really an inconvenient price we pay for free press. It's so enticing to think of a world in which reporters who do not fact-check properly be fined.

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