A crazy old woman began freak­ing out on a flight from Lon­don to Wash­ing­ton this morn­ing, caus­ing a skir­mish that led to the plane’s diver­sion to Logan Airport.

Accord­ing to the New York Times, CNN reported that “the woman was car­ry­ing matches, a screw­driver, Vase­line and two notes refer­ring to Al Qaeda. One note was in Eng­lish and the other in Arabic…”

Of course all of those claims turned out to be false.(*) The woman, from Ver­mont, was just hav­ing a panic attack.

Which leads me to won­der, if you were a news orga­ni­za­tion, how the fuck could you get some­thing that wrong and put it on the air? As one of the largest news­gath­er­ing oper­a­tions in the world, surely you could find ways to double-check your facts before assert­ing them as truths before the pub­lic. I can imag­ine what the crawl text on the bot­tom of the screen must have looked like. Ter­ror­ism this. Ter­ror­ist that. We were the first to report… The cable news net­works (includ­ing the Cable News Net­work) have never been renowned for their cred­i­bil­ity, but this seals the deal. I’m not even going to talk to peo­ple who get their news from cable TV.

(*) Edit: she did have matches. Those are not pro­hib­ited items, however.