A couple of weekends ago, I was invited onto BBC Breakfast News to review the Sunday papers. Arriving at the studio in Salford, Manchester, at 6am, the producer presented me with a foot-high pile of the day’s newspapers and instructed me to pick five stories to talk about on air. All should be from different papers, none could be from the front page, and two needed to be ‘serious’. The Munich shootings had happened just two days before, when 18-year-old Ali David Sonboly lured victims to a McDonald’s restaurant before going on a killing spree that left nine dead and 35 injured. It was a horrific news event that simply couldn’t be ignored. Taking a deep breath, I sat down on the red sofa and flicked open a copy of The Observer to discuss this baby-faced teenager’s murderous acts. It’s not the sort of thing any of us want to talk about, let alone in front of 2 million people, but trying to understand the mind of the young killer could actually help prevent such tragedies happening again. Read more
Tag: newspaper reporting
‘Google to rank pages by accuracy’ shown to be inaccurate
As a science writer who writes a lot about health, I spend more time than most scouring the internet for medicine-related information. Unfortunately, the advice that ‘Dr Google’ prescribes is all-too-often a bit dodgy. Search ‘how to treat my headache’, for example, and in alongside the sensible suggestions are some rather more dubious and laughable ‘natural cures’. Search for answers to child health problems and things get far scarier. A 2010 paper showed that only 39% of the top 500 Google results gave correct information about specific child health questions. Search queries related to mumps, measles and rubella and autism yielded the the most misleading information.
It was exciting, therefore, to learn of Google’s new effort to rid the internet of dodgy advice and quackery. Today, all search results are ranked according to popularity (crudely speaking); dodgy science seen as ‘trustworthy’ by appears toward the top of search rankings, regardless of how erroneous it may be. Published research reveals how Google ‘want to’ organise search results according to their accuracy. Read more
26 reasons not to trust what you read in the newspaper
So we all know we shouldn’t believe everything we read. Tabloids and science have never been the best of bed fellows (or should that be tabloids and the truth?).
But just how widespread is fallacious newspaper reporting? An intriguing little investigation from University College Chester made an attempt to measure the terribleness (or not) of health and nutrition reporting in the British press. For one month, two intrepid investigators bought a British tabloid every day of the week.
Focusing on articles covering food and nutrition, they compared what the newspaper wrote and the research it was (purportedly) based on. Here’s what they found… Read more