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)

    The eating of a MacDonald’s meal is like the reading of Reader’s Digest—small, easily digested, carefully processed, carefully cut down, abridged. Reader’s Digest gives us knowledge that is easily compartmentalized, simplified, ideologically sound.
    Clive Bloom, British educator. “MacDonald’s Man Meets Reader’s Digest,” Readings in Popular Culture: Trivial Pursuits?, St. Martin’s Press (1990)

    The three-year-old who lies about taking a cookie isn’t really a “liar” after all. He simply can’t control his impulses. He then convinces himself of a new truth and, eager for your approval, reports the version that he knows will make you happy.
    Cathy Rindner Tempelsman (20th century)

    Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern in whose frame the prediction moves and where it finds its evidence.
    Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)