Last night while watching the Weather Channel, it was reported that there was three feet of water flooding the NYSE. . .
. . .My wife gasped at the reporting. I told her I thought that, under the circumstances, it was “BS” and said so on Twitter.
The NYSE debunked the rumor minutes later, but not before CNN ran with it, too.
The coverage was ridiculous last night. We had CNN reporters — literally — in the water, reporting on what was going on at the NYSE. Worse is that some producer was feeding them the line without checking it first. Anyone who’s visited the NYSE would know that if it’s under three feet of water, everything south of the exchange would look like the lost city of Atlantis.
Here’s the map of flood zones in lower Manhattan. The red pin is the NYSE, in Zone C:
This seat-of-the-pants reporting is reminiscent of what we heard reported from NYC and D.C. on 9/11/01. Planes crashing everywhere, terrorists getting arrested on the GW Bridge, etc.
Twitter had its share of false rumors last night, but the service was incredibly useful with its instant fact-checking of dubious reports.