Man Rescued Eight Days After Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Not Actually Rescued After Eight Days

This is another interesting story about the sensationalism of the media and the lack of fact checking done by most major media outlets. I have seen the same story repeated on the websites of both national and local newspapers in the United States, Canada, China, and Australia with only a simple search for them.

The story is simply that a man was pulled alive from rubble at his home and seemed to be relatively unharmed, but in a state of shock when they found him. The man was reported to be in his 20s and was found alone in the home.

While MSNBC talks about “the Japanese media delivering a mea culpa“, I think that the big news distributors should share some of the blame. If the news business is about translating unverified information and passing it off as journalism, then I’ll just jot down some stories now about how there is a bidding war going on between Time Warner and Google over purchasing rights to the newzjapan.com blog… if I write the stories in Japanese maybe some recent college grad or other Japanese linguistic whippersnapper will translate it and think it’s news.

Sorry about the snark, but things like this remind me of the importance and power of independent, small time media more and more. The beauty of blogs and twitter and even Facebook are the personal observations of millions of people going into a big, giant, easily-accessible pot of information. It just required a little brains and research ability to sift through the sand and find the gold nuggets.

Anyway, the guy had gone back to his home to check it out but before that, was staying in a shelter. He must have been distraught, in shock, or just enjoying time away from the shelter, as when self-defense force searchers found him, he was on the 2nd floor of the tsunami-damaged home, wrapped in a blanket.