WCBS 880 RIP

Last Sunday night I listened to the last few minutes of WCBS 880.   It was one of two all news format radio stations in New York City.  It shut down forever at midnight to be replaced by WHSQ an ESPN sports format station which began broadcasting on the AM 880 frequency one minute later at 12:01.

I was a bit sorry to see it go as I had been listening to it since I moved to this area in 1983.  First in Ossining NY and then in Princeton NJ.  I preferred it to 1010 WINS the other NYC all news format station.  I thought the connection with CBS improved the national and international news coverage.  Also I listened some to Yankees games during the years they were broadcast on WCBS (in a bit of an exception to the all news format).  Mostly while driving but sometimes at home as well.

In recent years WCBS and WINS were owned by the same company and I expect they concluded  that two all news format radio stations was at least one more than NYC really needed.  I suppose I will get use to 1010 WINS soon enough but still this was an unwelcome reminder that nothing lasts forever.    

Fact Checking

Recently New York Magazine published an amazing story about a Stuyvesant High School student who had purportedly  made $72 million in the stock market.  When I read it I was pretty sure it was nonsense as in fact it soon turned out to be.  As the magazine admits its fact checking was obviously inadequate.  I expect this was caused in part by a failure to realize just how unlikely this story was and the implications for the appropriate level of fact checking.   Suppose for example that there are a million false claims like this for every true account.  Then fact checking sufficient to catch 99.9% of the false claims is totally inadequate as 99.9% of the surviving claims will still be false.   As the saying goes "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

New York Magazine stated:

... As part of the research process, the magazine sent a fact-checker to Stuyvesant, where Islam produced a document that appeared to be a Chase bank statement attesting to an eight-figure bank account. ...

But this is very ordinary fact checking.  Anybody can fake a bank statement.  The whole point of a bank reference is that you can verify it with the bank.  If New York Magazine had insisted on doing this they would likely have avoided this fiasco.