To Bring News To A Boil

Posted on July 12, 2010 by Markus Stocker, Recommended 0 | Recommend

(And increase entropy along the way.)

The pot was placed on the cooking stove shortly after noon with the brief announcement by NZZ that at 2pm CEST the Swiss justice minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf will announce the decision regarding the U.S. request to extradite Polanski. Since, some French rejoice «Merci la Suisse! Bravo la Suisse!» while some U.S. comments iterate around anger, Washington is disappointed and I won’t comment the decision. You are entitled to your opinion.

As I wrote, it began shortly after noon. Later in the afternoon, NZZ reported “Der Regisseur ist wieder ein freier Mann” and various online news sites followed, including the NYT with the headline “Swiss Reject U.S. Request to Extradite Polanski” and commentary at a separate article. While reading through some comments I ended up thinking @nytimes should add an option ‘bullshit’ under “Report as Inappropriate.” (And I have nothing against what reads like a sound argument on why the ruling is wrong.)

It didn’t take long for ‘Roman Polanski’ to get to trending topic status on Twitter — stay there for the better part of six hours — and spammer to ride the wave and link to all kinds of dubious sites. The Swiss were confused with the Swedes, the cuckoo of the German clock was put to guillotine and Swiss law equated to Swiss cheese. Granted, at least the cheese is more accurate w.r.t. geographic context.

I think, the most hilarious gaffe was cooked by CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) and CNN (@CNN), “The Worldwide Leader in News.” The former with the tweet “France will not extradite Roman Polanski to the U.S. to face child-sex charges. http://on.cnn.com/b9HxzP” — which later was replaced with “Correction: Switzerland will not …” — the latter with a retweet @cnnbrk without reading (emphasis added).

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Category: International, Thoughts
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