Anatomy of a Moral Panic

Maciej Cegłowski:

On September 18, the British Channel 4 ran a news segment with the headline, ‘Potentially deadly bomb ingredients are ‘frequently bought together’ on Amazon.’

The piece claims that “users searching for a common chemical compound used in food production are offered the ingredients to produce explosive black powder” on Amazon’s website, and that “steel ball bearings often used as shrapnel” are also promoted on the page, in some cases as items that other customers also bought.

The ‘common chemical compound’ in Channel 4’s report is potassium nitrate, an ingredient used in curing meat. If you go to Amazon’s page to order a half-kilo bag of the stuff, you’ll see the suggested items include sulfur and charcoal, the other two ingredients of gunpowder. (Unlike Channel 4, I am comfortable revealing the secrets of this 1000-year-old technology.)

Quality journalism is rapidly becoming a niche, and US TV news stations are one example — they’re basically unwatchable. I recently turned on CNN for a few minutes and it was a circus — a far cry from the professionalism I remember from their first few years of broadcasting.

I assume things will get better in the future, but I believe only a handful of publications will retain quality, and it will get a lot worse before that happens.