Phone Ignites Gas Station Fire

Flames shot up around a 21-year-old college student whose cell phone rang while he was pumping gas.
Phone Ignites Gas Station Fire (http://www.cbsnews.com)

I’m glad the guy wasn’t hurt.

If we could rig up something similar in classrooms and theatres, I bet people would remember to shut off their ringers.

The graphic shows what looks like a female hand covered in flames behind a fancy flip-tip PDA phone that’s hovering in the air. It’s a right hand with a ring on it… and are those age spots? I wonder if viewers ask themselves questions about whether the graphic artist knew what brand the telephone was? Is this particular cell phone is recognizable enough that people may be put off from buying it, perhaps associating “big flip-up screen” with “will cause gasoline to explode”?

While I recognize that people like having images, I’m always suspicious and annoyed at the graphics that are created out of thin air to entertain TV viewers who will switch to other channels if there isn’t enough eye candy. The fact that the stations have to put resources into the creation of fictionalized graphics in order to keep their market share, rather than hiring more reporters or fact-checkers, is one reason why it’s so easy to produce polished TV that is shoddy journalism. (I don’t mean that this particular story is shoddy journalism… it’s the graphic that I’m talking about.)

3 thoughts on “Phone Ignites Gas Station Fire

  1. I saw this one coming:

    Bombarded by media inquiries and skeptical researchers, New Paltz Fire Chief Pat Koch withdrew Tuesday from his original conclusion that a college student accidentally sparked vapors by answering his cell phone. — Poughkeepsie Journal

    While journalists do hard work in an important job, this is more evidence that journalists often get things wrong, and the people who they present as authorities are not always experts in that particular field.

    That mythbusters thing is great, by the way!

  2. Great rant on the abuse of graphics in TV journalism! So true. (It’s also true of internet journalism, of course… I’d add “to a lesser degree” but the fact remains that the internet is as GUI and multimediated as TV…and that many of the graphics that appear on TV are carted over to the web. As I am learning more and more, the convergence has already happened. Computers come with remote controls now.

  3. Doh…I forgot to add what I originally intended to say: that this is something of an urban legend, put to the test on the TV program, MYTHBUSTERS http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/mythbusters.html (…see, TV ain’t so bad!) If memory serves, they concluded that cellphone blow-ups are more likely a spark caused by the static electricity of pulling a phone out of one’s purse than the ringer itself (which, they posited, explains why more women then men are set fire at the pumps).

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