HERE’S A REPORT on the Florida non-terror inicident that’s worth reading. Excerpt:

Friday’s coverage was the source of a staggering amount of misinformation. Among the inaccurate reports:

• Several stations reported that a woman in Georgia told police three Middle Easterners were coming to Miami to blow something up. (That’s not what she said.)

• Several also said cops spotted the men after they roared past a tollbooth on I-75. (One car rolled by at a normal rate of speed; the other stopped and paid the tolls for both.)

• The cops used explosives to detonate a suspicious knapsack found in one car. (They didn’t.) Channel 7 reported that explosive ”triggers” were found in one of the cars. (There were no ”triggers” or anything else to do with explosives.)

• Channel 7 also reported that cops were searching for a third car. (They weren’t.)

It was a wretched performance — worse yet, a wretched performance that dragged on for eight hours, terrorizing South Florida and smearing the daylights out of three medical students who can be counted on to contribute heavily to the next edition of the travel guide What Sucks About South Florida.

”This is what is wrong with local news,” said Bill Pohovey, news director at WPLG-ABC 10, one of the two stations that kept their perspective on the story and stuck with regular programming. (WLTV-Univision 23 was the other.) “This is why viewers get disgusted with local news.”

My only quibble with Pohovey is the word local. The worst parody of journalism Friday was actually on CNN, where the high-paid-low-rated anchor Paula Zahn speculated, without a jot or tittle of evidence, that the three men were coming to Florida to blow up the Turkey Point nuclear reactor. Now you know why CNN promotes her sex appeal rather than her news judgment.

Sounds like what Reid Stott was saying. And mainline journalists say bloggers are sloppy?