If you haven’t been reading Ares, go check it out. It was a good blog to begin with, but since the arrival of Bill Sweetman, it has gotten even better. And today, Sweetman puts the smackdown on the New York Times:
Sunday’s New York Times runs a long feature on General Atomics – Aeronautical Systems Inc (GA-ASI) and the Predator unmanned air vehicle. If you are invited to visit GA-ASI, the NYT suggests “take a bit of advice: accept a ride on the corporate jet. The plane isn’t fancy. The cabin is cramped and the seats a little threadbare.”
The NYT may also have found the ride a bit rough. There’s this vibration, you see, caused by the big spinning three-blade thingies on the front of the engines of GA-ASI’s King Air. Memo to NYT. If you really want to get your credibility above the Jayson Blair level, maybe you should assign aerospace stories to someone who knows the difference between a propeller and a jet.
Further down, the NYT traces the UAV concept back to the 1930s and “a group of angry German commanders plotting revenge”. From this description, which makes Guderian and Rommel sound like high-schoolers miffed at being grounded on homecoming night, we get into the obligatory sports metaphors: “a strategy that allowed them to end-run their enemies’ trenches by using panzerdivizions”
By using WHAT? The NYT has made up this word and it has stormed past their renowned editors and fact-checkers like – well, a Panzer-Division. This is not war-geek nitpicking: the NYT would never, ever make such errors concerning something that they gave a rodent’s rear end about, like the latest Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit, or allegations of unspecified wrongdoing by the third cousin three times removed of a former deputy assistant White House aide.
Fantastic…go read the whole thing.
