Getting it right is not hard - but it takes work

Amy Gahran has an excellent post on her Contentious.com blog dealing with the apparent laziness of news organizations in failing to use easily available primary sources for information on the North Korean mushroom cloud (AP story via MSNBC and earlier AP story from South Coast Today. Here's CNN's take.).

Bottom line: This isn't rocket science. Or as she puts it:

In general, I think it’s pretty sad when news organizations look like they don’t know how to use the single most popular search tool on the internet… Pardon the pun, but none of this is nuclear engineering. It’s basic online research skills.