Canada’s Debate

Can someone explain to me what the journalistic raison d’etre is for this story, currently splashed across the front of the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail web pages? I don’t have a long post planned, because the ridiculousness of it all speaks for itself; just a few thoughts…

First, what does a reader learn from it? That radiation is bad… already knew that. That certain devices which 99.99% of readers don’t know or have never seen/used could be used for a dirty bomb? Again, I’ve always assumed that radioactive devices could be used to build radiation bombs. That fallout is dangerous and expensive to cleanup? No revelation there… That governments are planning for the worst? That’s what governments do. Now, I suppose if I were to ask a journalist what the point is of making this front page news, they would go on about “the people have the right to know,” yadda yadda yadda. This logic has always irked me. The public has the right to know; but that does not translate into “we have an obligation to regularly vomit out-of-context information.”

I guess the “insight” here is supposed to be that dirty bombs could cause panic… but I’ve got a trick knee that gets sore whenever I encounter irony, and it is aching severely at the moment.