Credulous or Cynical? Calling out Poor Reporting

You will of course remember the slew of scary sounding headlines between Christmas and the New Year, each one blindly repeating the same headline and the contents of a press release of a terrible study without any regard whether or not the press release relates to the study in any way shape or form.

I picked apart the press release and study the day after it appeared on the Eureka Alert site, as did Fergus Mason. Adam Jacobs (The Stats Guy) also pulled it apart and called it _Dangerous Nonsense _and rightly so. Linda Bauld with some help from Suzi Gage published a rebuttal in The Guardian, which didn’t get anywhere near the coverage that the original article received.

Guy Bentley from The Daily Caller published several articles during the whole debacle and Twitter was alive with people sharing all the articles, both positive and negative. Bradley J Fikes took his time reading both sides, the press release and the study, which shines through in his article.

Being the kind of person I am, I decided to complain about Knapton’s article so I duly completed the online form, complete with citations and all the information that was deliberately left out of the article; such as the comparison to cigarette smoke and the fact that cells exposed to it died within 24 hours of exposure. No where, not even once was that actually mentioned in any of the highly visible articles, or in print.

As per The Telegraph’s rules, they had five working days to respond, which they stuck to. I received a relatively lengthy e-mail from Jess McAree:

As newspapers are written for “general audiences” don’t you think it’s worthwhile including all the facts about a piece of scientific study? Such as the comparison to tobacco smoke? That’s called responsible reporting. As Clive Bates mentions – “The Daily Caller put the record straight and a vaper, Paul Barnes, did the best job of showing journalists how to be journalists: Facts do matter blog: degreasing engines and killing cells. Another vaper, Fergus Mason, followed up with a blog explaining it all for the giants of UK popular science writing: New study shows e-cigarettes are safer than tobacco smoke.”

Unless my thinking decided to take a wrong turn in to absurdity, I thought the job of a journalist and the paper is to report fact, not opinion. Sadly, it would appear my thinking did take that wrong turn as apparently it is absolutely fine to print the “opinion” (no matter how misguided or factually incorrect) of a researcher when it isn’t backed up by the study being reported on.

I didn’t dispute the accuracy of the first paragraph, I noted (just as Fergus did) “You can say they have similar effects as some things that cause cancer – and some things that don’t – but you can’t say they cause cancer” – I did not categorically state anything else to the contrary.

So, deliberately leaving out particular facts is “not significant” and that there is “no obligation” to mention the comparison to tobacco – when the headline itself clearly claims (albeit an opinion) that “e-cigarettes no safer than tobacco (emphasis mine)” – you would think that by making that comparison in the headline there would be more detail in the body. But no, the author was under “no obligation” to include that. The study itself proved that cells died from the control too, but that wasn’t mentioned either.

But here’s the telling part – “the study proved a mechanism for potential damage to human cells from e-cigarette vapour, which was the focus of the article“ – the focus of the article was the e-cigarette vapour causing damage to human cells. There is something extraordinarily wrong with that.

Again, I didn’t state that the article mis-represented Wang-Rodriguez’s comments, I stated that the article mis-represented the study (which I attached for reference, but it seems that it went unread as I expected). It is clear from the “Plainly, this would be true of a ‘chain-vaper'” comment that Jess McAree didn’t read the study, nor put any of my complaint into context.

I have since checked the article, and unfortunately for Jess McAree, there have been no other comments from Wang-Rodriguez added..

Not only have the Telegraph published a terribly biased story, but they also don’t actually believe there is anything wrong with it!