STS-117 - Incorrect Press Reports of Accident

Incorrect Press Reports of Accident

On 9 June 2007, the French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported that Atlantis had exploded shortly after take-off. The information circulated on their wire for a number of minutes, and appeared on a number of websites including Libération and Romandie News. It was later reported that AFP had prepared this sort of bulletin for every shuttle launch since the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and accidentally published it. This is equivalent to accidental automated press releases in the past, such as the infamous case of NBC erroneously reporting Joe DiMaggio's death in 1999, about six weeks before his actual death.

Read more about this topic:  STS-117

Famous quotes containing the words incorrect, press, reports and/or accident:

    Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.
    Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)

    Our press is certainly bankrupt in the “thrill of awe”Motherwise reverence: reverence for nickel plate and brummagem. Let us sincerely hope that this fact will remain a fact forever; for to my mind a discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty.
    Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)

    I think a Person who is thus terrifyed [sic] with the Imagination of Ghosts and Spectres much more reasonable, than one who contrary to the Reports of all Historians sacred and profane, ancient and modern, and to the Traditions of all Nations, thinks the Appearance of Spirits fabulous and groundless.
    Joseph Addison (1672–1719)

    It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
    Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)