Local TV Tries To Cover Shellshock Bug, Fails Miserably

With news breaking yesterday of a potentially catastrophic bug in the Bash shell since dubbed "Shellshock," media outlets rushed to breathlessly tell viewers about their newly hackable Apple computers. In that rush, they almost universally got the facts wrong.

"Bash" is not a bug; it's a shell, or a specific type of program inherent to Unix-based computers that allows for the input of commands. The "X" in "OS X" is a Roman numeral (and "Mac" was removed from the title of the operating system two years ago). And as for how "Linux" is pronounced, well, argue that down in the comments.

But what this supercut really reveals is how lazy local news producers are. I can't speak for how TV news is taught nowadays, but during my training, we were told to always rewrite wire copy and to re-edit any video that might accompany it. That clearly didn't happen, and the result is misled audiences.