Idiot reporters

As a regular watcher of documentary television, such as the Discovery Channel (is there anything else on TV worth watching?) I figure I've known for at least a dozen years that the pyramids in Egypt weren't built by slaves. It was probably decades ago that they found the living-quarters of the builders, which clearly showed them to be free craftsmen and not slaves.

Of course:

Films and media have long depicted slaves toiling away in the desert to build the mammoth pyramids only to meet a miserable death at the end of their efforts.

But we don't actually look to films for our facts, do we?

Well, maybe Reuters reporters do:

New tombs found in Giza support the view that the Great Pyramids were built by free workers and not slaves, as widely believed, Egypt's chief archaeologist said on Sunday.

Films and media have long depicted slaves toiling away in the desert to build the mammoth pyramids only to meet a miserable death at the end of their efforts.

"These tombs were built beside the king's pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves," Zahi Hawass, the chief archaeologist heading the Egyptian excavation team, said in a statement.

"If they were slaves, they would not have been able to build their tombs beside their king's."

Wow! Alert the media! Especially credulous reporters...of course at the bottom of the story is this:

"The first discovery of workers' tombs in 1990"

You know, it used to be that reporters had beats, and they would at least be slightly familiar with the subject they were reporting on. Apparently, that type of reporting has suffered from budget cuts.