The BrooklynPaper has an article about the Dept. of Sanitation hiring a biologist to manage/kill/whatever the geese. http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/34/15/dtg_goosekiller_2011_4_15_bk.html. Of course, the article also claims there are 193 geese in Prospect Park now. I don't know where they get these numbers or if they just make them up. I wonder if the rest of the article is as inaccurate. I am losing respect for the Brooklyn Paper daily. They don't seem to believe in fact-checking. Remember Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate? Their guiding mantra was to check each fact TWICE before they'd print it. Sadly, this seems to be a journalistic standard of the past. I think the journalistic standard is now the Wikipedia standard: Just print whatever you want, and if no one bothers to correct it, it must be true. Let's try it out.
NEW FACTS JUST IN:
1. The geese have been meeting in sleeper cells under the Audubon Bridge to plot a takeover of all of Brooklyn.
2. Extra-terrestrials landed in Prospect Park last week and have taken over the bodies of off-leash dogs while they study human behavior.
3. Long Meadow has been sold to a developer for high-rise, high-end condos.
If no one corrects me, these "facts" all must be true, and I am now a journalist!!!!
Everyone realizes these "facts" are a joke, right? RIGHT? Uh-oh.
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Extremely bad news, Deb. And yes, you are right. Reporters don't check facts or counts.
ReplyDeleteThat "193" count of the non-existent geese at PP however, is as good as an invitation to USDA to come in and gas or shoot whatever geese are there.
But, let's not beat up on Brooklyn Paper. The truth is that are few if any reporters worthy of being called, "investigative journalists."
That too, is a species going extinct, like the geese will eventually go if all the cullings, harassments and egg destructions are successful.
Sure, the geese may be somewhat plentiful now.
But, remember at one point, there used to be hundreds of millions of passenger pigeons who now only exist in museums.
Since 2009, Rupert Murdoch has owned the Brooklyn Paper, as well as the Courier-Life chain, so I don't think it's actually possible to be too hard on them.
ReplyDeleteGoose numbers are way down in Central Park too, from what they were in recent years. Ten at Harlem Meer. Fifteen at Turtle Pond. TWO at the lake and none at the pond. One can walk 3 miles in Central Park now and see a grand total of 27 geese! And when they start applying the harassment those 27 geese will get chased out and end up in any of the other parks where they WILL get gassed. This is really scary crap right now. And newspaper figures quoting phantom geese do NOT help. Am sick about all this.
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