The last month has been a rough one for journalists, which is why I’m glad I’m not one. I literally cringe when people call me a journalist. The term implies that I investigate and/or report the news. I do neither.

Rather, I make fun of those who make the news. Occasionally, I also deride those who report it. This is one of those occasions.

Most recently, there was the “Latvian meteorite strike” in a meadow near the Estonian border. Military units and scientists were sent to investigate a 27-foot-wide, 9-foot-deep crater after locals reported seeing a streak of light cross the sky.

News of the “strike” attracted worldwide media attention as Latvian security forces cordoned off the area to conduct radiation tests. Alas, the symmetrical pit didn’t contain any radiation or alien DNA because it was actually dug out by the Swedish mobile phone company Tele2 as part of an elaborate publicity stunt.

I’m not sure how a hoax involving a meteorite could benefit a cell phone company or why they figured they could pull it off. Maybe they thought the average reporter doesn’t know his or her ass from a manmade hole in the ground.

About a week earlier, American media outlets took the bait laid out by the liberal activist group Yes Men, who staged a fake news conference after sending out an official-looking press release. The phony release made it seem that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had reversed its position on climate change legislation – not an insignificant story.

Maybe that’s why both CNBC and Fox Business reported it as true instead of first checking to confirm the story was accurate. It wouldn’t have been that hard. A brief phone call to the real U.S. Chamber of Commerce could have saved both networks a lot of embarrassment, but neither wanted the other guys to be first with the big “news.” So, for fear of getting scooped, they got duped. But I’m sure the markets weren’t affected by their shoddy journalism.

And of course, only days before that, there was the national saga known as “Balloon Boy.” Then again, since Falcon Heene was never in the balloon to begin with, is he still “Balloon Boy”? It’s because of that paradox that I prefer to refer to the whole episode as “Douche Dad” instead.

Much has been said about the hoax hatched by deranged fame-seeker and all-around a–hole Richard Heene, but not enough has been said about the lack of self-control demonstrated by media outlets that fateful day. If they had been just a bit more skeptical and employed some solid science, maybe a few hours later, millions of people wouldn’t have been pissed off that a six-year-old boy was never in any danger.

Before abandoning coverage of President Barack Obama’s first trip to New Orleans since taking office and dedicating the remainder of the news cycle to an empty balloon in the sky over Colorado, networks should have immediately called upon their science and technology correspondents to analyze the situation. For instance, CNN should have had Miles O’Brien on the phone. He could have clued Americans in on the fact that Mylar balloons – even ones shaped like a giant tin of Jiffy Pop – deform when subjected to a load, such as a 50-pound boy.

He could have told anchors Kyra Philips and Rick Sanchez that, because the balloon we saw floating over three counties wasn’t warped from the weight of the alleged passenger, chances were the thing was empty. I don’t know why they didn’t get their science guy on the horn.

This just in: Miles O’Brien left CNN last December when the company shut down its space, science, and technology department. (How’s that for investigative journalism?)

So let me get this straight. CBS has three versions of CSI (original, New York, and Miami – which all feature scientists solving crimes with science), Numb3rs (a show about a mathematics genius who uses quantum principles to solve crimes), and The Big Bang Theory (a sitcom about a bunch of scientists who can solve the square root of pi but can’t figure out how to get laid). Meanwhile, CNN had to let go their one actual science guy. Somewhere, Mr. Wizard is crying.

I know things are tight in the news industry and media outlets are increasingly feeling the pressure to employ more sensationalistic tactics to hold the ever-dwindling attention span of the American public, but there’s no need to completely disband the science and technology department.

Otherwise, you end up with anchors who don’t know Planck’s constant from Avogadro’s number consulting with a hot-air balloon expert on live TV about an enclosed Mylar balloon filled with helium. After all, they both float, right? Yeah, and so does sh–t.

Here’s a suggestion for whenever something like this happens again. Instead of allowing the teleprompter-reading liberal arts graduate in front of the camera to whip the nation into a frenzy like a melodramatic reality show narrator, CNN should get Adam and Jamie from MythBusters to analyze the situation. They have a better grasp of scientific principles than 99% of the talking heads on TV. Plus, people will pay attention because they’re always blowing stuff up. You’re welcome, Mr. Turner.

Sadly, often the only person with any sort of scientific background at a news desk is the weather person. In fact, even though his degree is typically in meteorology, he’s sometimes recruited to elucidate to viewers all sorts of non-weather stories. Whether it’s earthquakes, tsunamis, or astronomical events, many news organizations depend on their weather folks to help explain things from the world of science, as long as the story has nothing to do with medicine. The ubiquitous “medical correspondent” handles that beat.

That’s not to say that every weather person on TV is an Ira Flatow. Some are more like Nancy Hicks Gribble. Put more plainly, they were hired to point at a map while looking pretty. Such vapid pieces of eye candy (usually employed by shortsighted executives in the hopes of boosting ratings or receiving an occasional BJ) wouldn’t know the difference between a mid-level low and a mesocyclone.

Several years ago, WAFB had one of these “weather chicks” on the weekends. She was a strikingly gorgeous woman. One Sunday night in the late 90s, though, she said something so egregiously inaccurate she was never seen or heard from again. She simply vanished into the ether.

Thankfully for Channel 9, this was before the days of DVRs and YouTube. Since that jaw-dropping broadcast, it’s remained a dark secret about which station employees dare not speak except under deep hypnosis.

It was late May, right before the beginning of hurricane season, and WAFB, like most area stations, had an upcoming special about hurricanes and how to prepare for them. After this woman was done with her Sunday night forecast, she promoted the special while tossing the newscast back to the anchor. In the process, she posed a query about hurricanes that I could have answered when I was six years old.

She asked the anchor if she knew how hurricanes were named. Anybody from the Gulf Coast with half a brain knows storms are named alphabetically from a predetermined list. As each system reaches tropical storm strength, it’s given the next name on the list. Pretty simple, right?

To this day, no one knows where this woman learned about hurricane names. Maybe someone fed her a line of complete bullsh–t that she took at face value. Maybe she huffed the cheap hair spray in the makeup room before going on air.

Whatever the case, this woman said that hurricanes are named according to their strength. Elaborating while a puzzled Valentina Wilson looked on from the anchor chair, she said the storms that begin with letters at the end of the alphabet are stronger, while the ones that start with letters from the beginning are weaker.

Yeah, hurricanes William, Yolanda, and Zach killed so many people there’s no record of them ever hitting land. That’s how strong they were. Andrew, Betsy, and Camille, on the other hand, were pussies, but I digress.

Going back to the national media, there was another recent news item that exemplified how willfully retarded journalists are when it comes to technical issues. Instead of accurately portraying with precise word choices NASA’s plan to investigate the lunar surface for signs of water, numerous reporters, including respected anchors, said we were going to “bomb the moon.”

Webster’s Dictionary defines bomb as “an explosive device used to detonate under specific conditions.” Neither of the two objects NASA sent to the lunar surface exploded. They simply impacted the surface at a high rate of speed.

Both of them – one about the size of a bus, the other a subcompact car – were nothing more than artificial meteors. Last time I checked, natural ones, including some considerably larger and traveling at much higher velocities, hit the moon all the time.

As a matter of fact, researchers estimate the two collisions combined had the same effect on the moon that dropping an eyelash in the aisle would have on the speed and direction of a Boeing 747. But we “bombed the moon.”

Trading precise prose for attention-grabbing headlines may seem innocent, but inaccurate reports can be insidious in this Wikipedia age. What happens when some kid a few years from now researches the mission for a project and gets a poor grade for claiming that Americans bombed the moon in 2009?

Don’t believe me? Try this one on for size. True or false: The space shuttle Columbia exploded upon reentry on February 1, 2003.

The answer is false. It didn’t explode. It disintegrated. There was no remaining fuel on board to cause an explosion. It simply broke up into thousands of pieces after succumbing to the tremendous aerodynamic forces imposed by the reentry process after its outer shell was compromised by a foam impact during liftoff days earlier.

But because the debris rained down like dozens of little fireballs in the sky, innumerable “journalists” reported the shuttle had “exploded,” despite the fact that not one person from NASA ever said that it did. I guess it was just easier for those J-school grads to say it exploded rather than try to wrap their non-scientific minds around the concept of disintegration. After all, things in Michael Bay movies don’t disintegrate – they explode!

It’s not that hard to understand the difference between the two phenomena. An explosion is a sudden, violent release of potential energy (e.g., the space shuttle Challenger 73 seconds after liftoff in 1986), whereas disintegration is akin to crumbling.