Okay, my wife just sent me this, knowing full well it would set me off on one of my favourite rant topics:
No, I don't rant about starfish.
My beef here is with a problem that I feel causes a lot of negative issues and yet seems to be rarely acknowledged or addressed: irresponsible journalism.
Some unknown biologist, desperate to publish something, comes to the "astonishing" conclusion that the community of bottom-dwelling marine life in arctic waters includes some organisms that are carnivorous. Well, duh! How is that surprising...or news...or any kind of "discovery"?
But that's not the issue here. It's when some "journalist" takes that bit of unremarkable data...and manages to dramatize it to:
There's a hungry Arctic predator with a lot of arms that eats polar bears!
Now, take that idiotic headline, and present it to an audience of people who typically get all their "news" from internet snippets like this. These folks don't question anything...and they certainly are far too busy to actually do any thinking themselves; I mean, that's why they have the internet, right?
So you get a bunch of misinformed morons who will fight to the death with you if you so much as suggest that they don't have a clue about the topic in question. Throw them into an environment, such as a lunchroom at work, with one or two people who rise to a stupid comment like a bass to a floating frog...not that I know anybody like that personally
...and potentially bad things ensue.
I won't even go into the horror of trying to explain to a member of one's own family who is, shall we say...gullible?...that there really is no cause for concern, and that they can go back to worrying about the Killer Death Stars that are poised to fry the Earth's surface with a lethal pulse of gamma radiation.