Murray Gell-Mann effect: I know, even as a civilian, that the DSSC is not the NDC, that the chopper was an IAF craft and not an Army one, that the CDS is a four-star general and not a five-star one (Field Marshal), that the RM is different from the RRM, as some examples of things I know some news channels are getting wrong and blatantly carrying on without correction. But even when some of them say something like this and I wince, I then carry on listening to (and believing) everything else they are saying about the incident as if it is the divine truth.
P.S: Don’t ask me which channels got which of these wrong. All of them are doing some jiggery-pokery and just improv winging it at some point of the other. That is just how live news is reported across the world, I guess. Speed over accuracy. So, not pointing to Indian MSM particularly, but generally to the way speed has trumped truth in the battle for breathless broadcasting where ‘first’ is more important than ‘right’.
