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Doubters and deniers are empowered by the main-stream media which has an interest in pumping up bad science or providing misleading headlines to create a 'debate' where there should be none

Media's Misleading Headlines



A recent study out of Australia takes on misleading headlines and confirms that most people either don't really read past the headlines, or at least, they don't retain much information from the story besides the headlines. (1)
The researchers showed four short articles to 51 undergraduate students from the University of Western Australia. One of these articles was about genetically modified foods; it presented several opinions on GMO foods; getting into some of the public's concerns about safety, but then included quotes from scientists like this one: “There is no logical reason they should be of any health concern.” Pretty clear. But some of the students got a version of this article with the headline “GM foods may pose long-term health risks,” while others saw the boring but accurate “GM foods are safe.” Sure enough, those who saw the headline emphasizing the health concerns tended to remember more about the potential risks than the safety. (2) Then there are cases where the specialized meaning of words in science can led to public confusion when the media applies scientific terms out of context. A notable example recently occurred when the media reported the Antarctic ice sheet is collapsing, a phenomenon media reports claim will raise sea levels and inundate cites. Tom Sheahen reports, on a trending environmental topic often appearing in today's media involving the West Antarctic Ice Shelf (WAIS), a region comprising about 8 percent of the ice covering Antarctica. Within that region, there are two glaciers that are sliding down to sea at a steady pace, as glaciers always do. They constitute about 10 percent of WAIS, (LESS THAN 1 PERCENT OF THE TOTAL ANTARCTIC ICE). Their descent has been in progress for several thousand years and is neither new nor, man-caused. It will go on for a few thousand more years, after which the two glaciers will be gone. This is the 'collapse' you are hearing about. Unfortunately, the media overlooks the distinction that 'collapse' is a specialized geological term and they extend generalizations from the two specific glaciers and apply those claims to the entire WAIS, to Antarctica in general, and even to the entire planet, and make it sound like it will happen very soon. Scientists who rightly point to the relatively small glacier size and volume of ice and the time frame are brushed aside in a rush to produce a headline or a flamboyant sound bite that will keep viewers tuned in. (3)

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Words like 'unavoidable collapse' carry a sense of foreboding that 10,000 year time tables cannot match. Sheahen adds, “Unfortunately, attending to precise definitions requires patience and can be tedious. The media does not want to run the risk of appearing boring, so they take shortcuts and oversimplify. Consequently, millions of people are misled by statements that use scientific words incorrectly.” Then there's the case of health risks. A seminar covering health risks at Columbia University suggests that most media organizations have a long way to go in giving the public a true picture of which health issues should concern them and which are less worrisome. The good news is that we're living longer, which is something rarely mentioned in articles about frightening new discoveries that could present a danger to health. (4) Kimberly Thompson of Harvard's School of Public Health discussed the history of vaccination and how, as diseases eradicated by vaccination fade from memory, the risks associated with vaccines become more frightening to parents. She noted the rise in cases of measles associated with reduced vaccination rates due to fears that the MMR vaccine could cause autism, and discussed how the media paid a great deal of attention to the theories of Andrew Wakefield about the autism/vaccine connection. Far less coverage, however, was given to the repudiation of the paper he published on the subject by his co-authors and to the discovery of his undisclosed connections with those who were suing vaccine makers, which caused the journal which published the paper to say it would not have done so had it known of the conflict of interest, observes Maia Szalavitz. (4) The now discredited paper panicked many parents and led to a sharp drop in the number of children getting the vaccine that prevents measles, mumps and rubella. Vaccination rates dropped sharply in Britain after the papers publication, falling as low as 80% by 2004. Measles cases have gone up sharply in the ensuing years. In the United States, more cases of measles were reported in 2008 than in any other year since 1997. More than 90% of those infected had not been vaccinated or their vaccination status was unknown, reports Clarice Feldman. (5) These are just a few examples; one could write a book on this topic since there are many more. Doubters and deniers are empowered by the main-stream media which has an interest in pumping up bad science or providing misleading headlines to create a 'debate' where there should be none. References
  1. Ullrich K. H. Ecker et al., “The effects of subtle misinformation in news headlines,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, October 27, 2014
  2. Melissa Dahlia, “This headline will totally mislead you,” nymag.com, October 31, 2014
  3. Tom Sheahan, “Media twists specialized meaning of science words, Environment & Climate News, July 2014
  4. Maia Szalavitz, “Media distorts health risks, say experts,” stats.org/stories, November 21, 2006
  5. Clarice Feldman, “Be scientific (skeptical) about scientific research,” American Thinker, January 9, 2011


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Jack Dini -- Bio and Archives

Jack Dini is author of Challenging Environmental Mythology.  He has also written for American Council on Science and Health, Environment & Climate News, and Hawaii Reporter.


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