Joe Malchow: Can He Read Words?

So Malchow has a little human-interest throwaway post the other day. The headline is "Tests of Archimedes' Solar Death Ray Fail." Text says "The excellent television show Mythbusters has busted Archimedes of Syracuse's infamous sun-channeling death ray."

Now, if you click on that link that is in his text, and I did, you get to a page that says the following:

"More than 2,000 years later, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Arizona set out to recreate Archimedes' fabled death ray Saturday in an experiment sponsored by the Discovery Channel program 'MythBusters. Their attempts to set fire to an 80-year-old fishing boat using their own versions of the device, however, failed to either prove or dispel the myth of the solar death ray."

The headline, being the only part of the post which is factually correct or even at all corcordant with the article, he just copied and pasted.

Look, I know this isn't a big deal, and he didn't spend much time on it, or whatever, but honestly is it that much trouble to read and summarize accurately the articles you cite? Why should we believe this guy is accurately quoting anything he sources? There was no reason for him to even spin this, and he still fucked it up.

In fairness, the article say this:

"Peter Rees, executive producer of 'MythBusters,' said the experiment showed Archimedes' death ray was most likely a myth. 'We're not saying it can't be done,' Rees said. 'We're just saying it's extremely impractical as a weapon of war.'"

And also:

"'MythBusters' also tried to recreate the ray last year, and after failing, declared the story a myth."

But then it says:

"The experiment showed it may be technically possible, but didn't answer whether Archimedes used it to destroy enemy ships, MIT professor David Wallace said 'Who can say whether Archimedes did it or not?" he said. "He's one of the great mathematical minds in history. I wouldn't want to underestimate his intelligence or ability.'"

So what the fuck are you trying to say, here, Connor? This all seems pretty convoluted, and Joe was just putting it up because it's kind of funny, and who cares if he didn't get the facts straight about something this silly anyway? Because it demonstrates the same willingness to oversimplify out of laziness and/or desire to distort that has DEFINED the right-wing media for the last decade or so. Malchow had no reason to distort this, so he got it wrong because he just didn't fucking care about writing down what was true. Too involved! Go for the sound bite! Sum that shit up in a sentence! Make it a foppish, inelegant sentence (this is Malchow)!

Depending on how you cut those citations, you could make it sound like the article made a convincing case for either position on this admittedly irrelevant issue. Malchow is down to pull that shit, and I am not. That's the difference between me and him. That and about four inches of penis.