Media Fake News Reading
Uploaded by scam655 on Nov 17, 2023
The Earthquake and Aftershock Fact vs Fiction
In the days after the earthquake that ultimately killed 369 people in central Mexico, people remained captivated by the coverage as events unfolded. But for at least a day and a half, the devastation and rising death toll were not the focus of all that attention, rather the world was united in following a single hashtag: #frida. The series of events behind the hashtag was well documented.
First, the Enrique Rébsamen school collapsed on that Tuesday, September 19, when a 7.1-magnitude earthquake hit Mexico City. People rushed to pull injured children from the school, but hope soon dwindled (Specia, 2017). By evening of the next day the military, the police, and local volunteers had been digging for more than 24 hours, but reports emerged of a girl who was alive inside the rubble (Mullany, 2017). Soon attention swirled around reports that a 12-year-old girl was trapped in the rubble of a collapsed elementary school as rescuers rushed to save her (Argen, 2017). It wasn’t long before television cameras fixed their attention on the frantic rescue operations. Tidbits of information about the child, who some began to identify as Frida, trickled out. Some reported that she was with five other children, others that she had spoken to rescuers and wiggled her fingers, and still others that she had been sent water.
Danielle Dithurbide, reporting for Televisa, Mexico City’s largest news network, said that rescuers had told her that a 12-year-old girl was trapped, and that she had been found using a thermal scanner. Rescue teams, she told viewers, had made contact with the child whose name was Frida Sofia. Rescuers were withholding the last name, the reporter said. Later that evening, Ms. Dithurbide interviewed rescuers on camera who spoke of a child trapped alive in the building. In one interview, a man who identified himself only as Artemio and as an “electrician and rescuer” told her that he had heard the voice of a girl.
“Yes, some very faint voices of a girl, apparently called Sofi,” Artemio said. “I asked, ‘Your name?’ She said, ‘Sofi, Sofi’” (Noticieros Televisacom, 2017).
In the early hours of Thursday, September 21, the Associated Press (AP) quoted another rescue worker with a similar story. The New York Times, among other news organizations, published the AP report: “Rescue worker Raul Rodrigo Hernandez Ayala came out from the site Wednesday night and...