Petra, Good suggestions. But, I think international and national news organizations need to have a contact list ahead of time...ahead of a natural disaster. Most have meterologists, so storms are not so much of a problem. OK, I saw the same woman give the same report (live) 4 hours later, and she made the same mistakes...I think it was her use of the spring that set me off...it was just too lame. And, yes, it was also wrong for tsunamis. Did it matter? Not 22 and 26 hours after the quake as far as saving lives. But, CNN could have saved lives if they had a smart geologist on call at the time of the quake. So, it is not a joke when they do this. It is likely at resorts that people may have flipped on CNN when they felt the quake (Thailand), or might have just been watching by chance in Sri Lanka.
This morning, I watched CNN again, and they had a different meteorologist explain tsunamis. He did not get it flat out wrong, but it was a bit lame. Of interest to some on this page is that he pointed out that it was a full moon, and then implied but did not actually state that it had something to do with the quake....he did pretty much say it had something to do with the effects of the tsunami (it would have had little effect unless there is a big tide range at affected areas and it was high tide). In other words, he went and talked about what he understood and then talked about plates crashing into each other and the causes of tsunamis being like that of explosions (better than the spring analogy...). No one has talked about the size of the rupture area as having a lot to do with how a wave can cross an ocean without attenuating to little....
Chris