Gullibility Reigns Supreme

How can we still wonder at the media’s gullibility (see “weapons of mass destruction”) when they still fall for idiocy like the new “Loch Ness footage”? The ludicrously stupid CNN story would be laughable if it weren’t passing off flagrant lies as “news.”

An “amateur scientist” caught the footage? Um... no. Gordon Holmes is a fringe self-publisher who claims to have photographed fairies. Not exactly a credible eyewitness, and certainly not a “scientist” by any stretch of the imagination.

The Loch Ness monster “was first caught on camera by a surgeon on vacation in the 1930s”? Not even close. The infamous “surgeon’s photo” was a hoax.

I can’t believe there are still people who cling to the idea of a mysterious “monster” in an enclosed body of water. Now, would one — or even a handful — of such creatures be able to escape detection? Perhaps. But seeing as how these stories go back nearly a century (and the creature would presumably have to have been there for some millenia before that), we’re talking about a breeding population. Sorry, but there we’re talking about hundreds, even thousands of animals.

I suppose to the die-hard true believers, it’s something akin to the “intelligent design” argument: This is an instance where God just waved his magic wand and went “poof” — spontaneously generating either an immortal beast or an animal that can miraculously overcome the restrictions of genetics to reproduce indefinitely with only a Noah’s ark-sized gene pool.

But I suppose it’s to much to imagine that the supposedly intelligent mainstream media would have outgrown fairy tales.