Greenmartian2008 said:
CNN bashed it for 90 minutes...
This is due to the fact that CNN has to run 24 hours a day, stopping only for commercials. And unlike NASA-TV, CNN can't have "dead air." They have to be in a constant state of yammering. So if nothing new is happening, they have to keep going over the same stuff, over and over, using people who graduated with liberal arts degrees. The talking heads job is to, well, talk. To read off a teleprompter.
But I tell you this so that our non-USA members can understand why US News broadcasts is in such a crappy conditional state.
24/7 explains it quite adequately.
Don't expect technical accuracy from any of the news services, especially FOX NEWS (Fair and Balanced! We Report, You Decide!) or CNN.
Or, in fact, *any* news service. And keep that distrust for more than just technical accuracy, but for all news, especially if there is the remotest possibility of a political angle to it. Distrust the news until it can be verified. Especially distrust anything of a speculative nature. And go into full-blown news-athiest mode if they every say anything positive about a politician.
I'm unsurprised that Fox News' explanation for the PDE was, to say the least, clumsy. The talking head is no more educated on the concept of PDE's than your average actor, and the expert they talked to was probably unprepared. I shudder to imagine what kind of moron I'd come off looking like if I had ten minutes to prepare for an interview on something I'm very familiar with. Or ten hours to prepare. Or ten weeks.
But what's really disturbing is the BBC: they like to pretend that they are top-notch, but they get even the most basic facts on technical, scientific and American matters utterly dead wrong. For example, here is the very first Google hit when searching for "BBC" and "NASA":
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1351319.stm
For those who still think it is a face, built by an ancient race of Martians, the American space agency (Nasa) just wants to say: "look at this picture".
Very first sentence, complete ignorance is put on display. Anybody see it?