Steward! Yes, excuse me, the gremlin on the wing has just informed me that this young woman's breasts are going to explode!

Ah, newspapers. We’ve already commented on their tendency to jump on (or in fact create) a headless chicken bandwagon in order to sell papers keep the public informed (for an excellent article on this subject, check out Charlie Brooker) and lately, a story came along that was, in many ways, harder for them to resist than a good old moral panic over drugs. It had everything; terrorism, a Carry On film edge, scary women’s bodies, modern science gone mad and, what all newspapers are looking for, something new for people to be afraid of. Buy this newspaper or you will DIE! Too bad it wasn’t at all feasible or, in fact, true.

“Terrorists ‘could use exploding breast implants to blow up jet’” warned the Telegraph. Cue panic in the streets! Anyone you know could be a secret terrorist with deadly breasts! Next time you sleep with a woman, how will you know her chest isn’t going to explode right in the middle of things?! Maybe that woman with the big breasts who’s on your plane to Disneyland is a threat to your children! But really, the only warning signs present here are to do with the nature of the article itself.

“Breast implants packed with explosives could be used to blow up an airliner, experts are said to have warned.” Well now, I count three obvious marks of hemming and hawing in just this once sentence. Terrorists could use explosive breast implants to blow up a plane? Well yes, I suppose they could, but I could also stuff a pet snake with condoms filled with plastic explosive, get it put in the luggage hold and do the same. That doesn’t mean I’m going to.

Then there’s that ever present word – experts. Experts said this, experts said that. When newspapers deploy this term they never explain what they mean by an expert, what qualifies their expert to comment and half the time they don’t even say who the expert is! It’s one of those catch all stylistic get outs that newspapers use in order to print any old shite they want. In this case, the Telgraph aren’t even confident enough to say definitively that their experts have made this warning. They’re only “said to have warned” of it. Now, what does that mean?

The Sun in all its glory. Don't buy it!

All is revealed once we get further into the article. The source of the Telgraph’s information is…The Sun. The Sun. That well known paragon of good, honest journalism. Apart from the nature of the paper the Telegraph are using as a source, this is yet another habit of modern newspapers, and it’s one of the most destructive and poisonous. They don’t do independent investigation (you know, actual journalism) but instead they just feed off of each other’s panic until you end up with newspapers screaming ridiculous things about exploding breast implants. Maybe though, just maybe, The Sun had a reliable source? No such luck; their source was Fox fuckin News. The biggest amount of work the Telegraph did for this story was to phone a plastic surgeon to see if it was at all possible to put an explosive implant into a woman’s breast or, in fact, a guy’s arse cheeks – isn’t it hillarious how they kept the bomb implants all gender appropriate?

I can’t believe that none of them thought to answer one very simple question. How on earth do you detonate a breast bomb? Nipple fuses?

Eventually, the air was cleared by an unlikely source – the bigoted, foaming at the mouth US neocon website World Net Daily. I wont link to it here, but a bit of googling should lead you to the right article if you so desire. Essentially, it seems, the Telegraph didn’t even attribute this ridiculous quote to the right person. They claimed that Joseph Farah, self proclaimed terrorism expert and editor in chief of World Net Daily, had warned of this new development in blowing things up. Instead though, it was actually one of his underlings at the site (who even they seem embarrassed by) who made this claim and then put the words in his boss’ mouth, probably to lend them more legitimacy (lol).

The upshot of all of this is that the whole story is a piece of nonsense, which UK newspapers printed without doing any serious investigation, and after yet again taking ‘experts’ at their word. And will they learn their lesson? Will they print an erratum? No, of course not. They’ll keep on doing the same thing, peddling shite to a mass audience, because it makes them money and fits with their owners’ agendas. It’s easy to drop a journalistic grenade among an already on edge population – it’s much harder to do the work of debunking the nonsense that papers print.

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