Asteroid will destroy Earth on 35 March 2041 - PHOTO

Media outlet CNN has withdrawn a story that claimed a giant asteroid would destroy Earth on 35 March, 2041 and confirmed there is ‘no risk to Earth’.Producers at the media giant were left red-faced when they neglected to fact-check a story that suggested ‘all life could be extinguished in less than 30 years’.The network issued a correction and pulled the user-posted report on Monday – but not before it went viral, receiving over 250,000 views and being shared 24,000 times on Facebook, according to Salon.The iReport, posted by user Marcus575, claimed that a ’10-mile-wide object’ 51 million miles away was on a trajectory towards Earth, citing NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and saying the date of the encounter was 35 March, 2041.Despite multiple notes on the report reading ‘not vetted by CNN’, the article was linked to by several major media outlets.CNN replaced the post with a statement: ‘NASA has confirmed via email that this story is false. A spokeswoman for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the largest object detected by NEOWISE measures 3km in diameter and poses no risk to Earth. The iReport has been removed.’Nevertheless, CNN have drawn criticism for not fact-checking content generated by users, who will find it hard to trust a media outlet that allows bogus stories to be presented under its name.As Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee who runs the Nasa Watch blog, points out, the clues were there:‘March 35?’ he writes.‘Love the tags: ‘bieber, war, gaming, stocks, science, cyrus, space, obama, earth, states.’(CNN)Bakudaily.az