Here's an example of bad science journalism from the latest edition of New Scientist [Tea might pose fluoride risk].Tea might pose fluoride riskYou have to read further in the article to see that it refers to a study done in Sri Lanka where the drinking water contains high levels of fluoride.
Tea drinkers beware. Too much of the wrong kind can add significantly to the amount of fluoride you consume, with the tea in just four cups supplying up to one-third of the maximum safe daily amount.
In some parts of Sri Lanka drinking water contains up to five times the maximum fluoride recommended by the World Health Organization, and some 98 per cent of people are affected by fluorosis.The study shows that local tea grown in Sri Lanka contains fluoride so when you make tea with the water containing excess fluoride you get an increased dose of fluoride. Even if you make the local tea with distilled water you still get excessive doses of fluoride with just four cups of this tea.
All this is explained in the article but the headline and the opening paragraph are very misleading. It's only certain kinds of tea that might cause a problem and it's not at all clear whether people in other countries can even buy this tea. It almost seems as though the person who wrote this article was deliberately trying to to scare people in order to attract readers. That's not acceptable science journalism.
[Photo Credit: Harvesting tea leaves in Malaysia from Encyclopedia Brintannica]
There is no doubt that members of the public are increasingly concerned about health issues and the latest scare story will generally attract a lot of attention for a week or two. This creates a great opportunity for certain journalists to sell newspapers based on at best misleading headlines. Often the story focuses on one small part of a much larger study to an extent that can completely distort what the report authors are saying.
ReplyDeleteIt is frustrating and the issues around the health benefits of tea are especially prone to this distortion as tea is something that most people love.
Larry,
ReplyDeleteYou're blaming the wrong person.
Editors write the headlines, not the article writers. Usually the person
writing the article has no idea what headline it will end up with.
If you know this and watch out for it
you can see many instances where the
editor clearly didn't understand the article fully or chose to emphasize
a particularly unimportant side aspect
of it. It's pretty common unfortunately.
You can do this little exercise:
select a somewhat obscure story in google news and read the different versions in different newspapers. They
are typically all based on the same
agenture story. Check the head lines
each time. You'll often notice that
the headline is subtly or more clearly
wrong.
It seems to be even worse in online
media than in printmedia I think.
I also notice this sometimes in the
backcover descriptions of fiction
books. They sometimes look like the person who wrote it didn't bother to read the book completely. It seems
to be a little less common than in
newspapers though
~n
Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteI'm well aware of the fact that someone other than the author may have written the headline. That still falls under the rubric of "science journalism" in my book.
Besides, the opening paragraph of the piece is just as misleading as the headline and we can assume that the author was responsible for that.
Part of the problem in science journalism is due to editors and not specifically science journalists. We need to fix all parts of the problem and that means teaching editors that they are usually incompetent when it comes to recognizing what's important in a science article. That's not going to be easy since these editors assume that they can edit articles and write headlines for everything under the sun.