The past few weeks seem to have seen laments for the decline of journalism and obituaries for old media reaching a critical mass. BoraZ has kindly collected a few dozen so that I don’t have to.

Perhaps it’s just because I’ve been reading Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News, and because Davies did the last Skeptics in the Pub, that I have been noticing that the decline of newspapers is reaching this critical stage. Davies is a Guardian investigative journalist, and he’s breaking the rules by telling us just what a state the media is in. Flat Earth News, written two years ago, before the American newspapers started going bankrupt, and British newspapers shed half their workforce, documents the many multiplicative flaws in the system of news gathering, reporting, and dissemination which cause journalists to churn out the crap the passes for newspapers these days.

Davies’ conclusion is that journalism — a noble profession of bright people — has, largely as a cost-cutting measure, been reduced tochurnalism . Instead of spending a week researching a story in great depth and telling us the important facts that we didn’t know, journalists have been reduced to rewriting a dozen wire stories and press releases each day. Journalists no longer have the time, the background knowledge, or the luxury of specialisation, required to find out whether the words they are writing bear any resemblance to reality. Nor do they have the time to establish what conflicts of interest of their sources have and whether they are hiding things — instead, the words can be reported as he-said/she-said, and the report can technically never be wrong.

Indeed, the media and public relationships industry have evolved a sophisticated mutualistic relationship. Newspapers could not fill their papers without press release writers doing all their research (and even choosing their words) for them, and in return, interested parties get their side of the story, or their product, prominently placed in the story.

M’colleague suggested that this thesis sounded a little like a conspiracy theory. I, however, am generally convinced. I am convinced because I have seen it work so many times in the field that I am familiar with — science and medicine. I have seen how the British tabloid (and even broadsheet) newspapers build their oncological ontological database from poorly written press releases. I have seen how interested parties both in industry and pressure groups place their doubt or certainty in news stories about the environment. I’ve seen the basic failure of fact-checking as elementary mistakes in press releases about newly published journal papers are faithfully replaced in all papers. I’ve even seen my own words from Wikipedia appear in The Metro‘s obituary of John Peel. And I’ve seen how successfully our own side has fought back on the media’s own terms, when Sense About Science press released their detox dossier in the slow news week after Christmas.

Flat Earth News provides the overarching explanatory theory for why so much of the news media is, to quote a comment on Friday’s Ryanair-toilets “news story” publicity stunt, “such a great lorry load of cock.” Science bloggers like a good whinge about a bad science or medicine story in the paper, but the problem is much greater than just a few humanities graduates trying to write about science. That skepticism you apply when reading the science stories needs to apply to the politics, foreign events, business, and everything else besides, because the authors of those items know no more about their subject than the humanities graduates covering science do about theirs.

Journalists can cry that democracy is not possible without them; but there’s nothing empowering about a media that churns back the press releases of government departments and military agencies. There is nothing empowering in the Daily Mail.

Wow, a slow news day, eh? The BBC, shunning predictable Chinese military aggression, another turn of the tides in Iraq, and yet more boring news about the economy, lead with “Brown criticised over embryo bill“. Somebody at BBC News is clearly a fan of Cardinal Keith O’Brien. ‘Keith who?’ I hear you ask. What do you mean you’ve never heard of the leader of the Roman Catholic church in Scotland? The big news is that O’Brien is making a fuss over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. The bill, currently in parliament, will, amongst other things, make it easier for researchers to develop methods of growing tissues and organs that are genetically identical to those who require transplants or grafts, and is likely to help solve the problem of transplant rejection and the need for immunosuppressive drugs after transplants. Then there’s cancer, Alzheimer’s, HIV, blah, blah. This is, I’m sure you’ll agree, a terrible thing. I couldn’t put it better than O’Brien himself:

“This Bill represents a monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life.”

The reason, of course, is that this bill enables the use of hybrid embryos. Putting little bits of reprogrammed adult human DNA into animal zygote cells. This presents all sorts of obvious problems for the Roman Catholic Church. It suggests the clearly impossible: that humans are animals, evolved like all other animals, and following the same developmental rules as our neighbours. The Cardinal is, I am sure, confident that hybrid embryos will never work, because of the obvious fact that cows, pigs and mice are not created in God’s image. That’s elementary stuff. Comes right at the beginning, in Genesis 1:27. It’s almost embarrassing that these biologists don’t know that.

Then there is the problem that this bill mentions embryology. The Roman Catholic church has, for the past few decades, tried to convince the world that it knows all about embryology. And don’t they just. Is it not the case that human embryos are human beings? Is it not so that fertilised eggs can think and feel, recite their twelve times tables, and lead missions into pagan lands? O’Brien is privileged with an intimate knowledge of God’s colossal mind, and he knows that God loves zygotes. So of course the Roman Catholic church must oppose a bill that makes such absurd claims as development being mind bogglingly complicated, life having fuzzy boundaries, or that you are infinitely more valuable and important than the half dozen skin cells that have fallen off your right index finger during your current browsing session.

Of course, it’s not just the mind of God that O’Brien knows intimately. God knows what you and I think, and he has spilled the beans to O’Brien:

“I can say that the government has no mandate for these changes: they were not in any election manifesto, nor do they enjoy widespread public support.”

Yes of course. Who is better placed to judge the beliefs, feelings and fears of the public on this matter than Cardinal Keith O’Brien? And he’s the perfect candidate to head this “single permanent national bioethics commission” that he proposes, too, what with his deep knowledge of developmental biology and reproductive medicine, and his profound understanding of the national mood. Not to mention that direct line to God. You couldn’t find a more representative candidate in the land.

Indeed, people were talking of nothing but the Human Fertilisation and Embryology bill on the crowded train home yesterday, and I can tell you, they’re not too happy about the army of monsters that are coming our way. “Haven’t these scientists ever heard of zombies,” one of them asked? Another was concerned that the convergence of reprogrammed human nuclear DNA with bovine mitochondrial DNA within the same cell membrane could just be the final straw that breaks the camel’s back and leads God to break his promise never again to commit genocide by flooding the earth. One gabbling mouthbreather even pointed out that such an untested and unprecedented confluence of incompatible nucleotide sequences could, for all he knew, flip the earth’s magnetic poles and precipitate the fiery conclusion of the universe.

Oh wait, have I got that right? Now I think about it, perhaps Britain is not the reactionary backwater that O’Brien thinks it is. Perhaps the senile and simple individuals who pray for the souls of cells do not make more than an entertaining but tiny minority of people in this country. Perhaps, just maybe, O’Brien’s series of non-sequiturs have led him to a confused and offensively hyperbolic fantasy about morality that he is pretending is representative of a universal hallucination of the British public. Sure, this bill does not have widespread popular support. But that is because parliamentary bills get only widespread popular obliviousness and apathy. The cardinal is dreaming if he believes that there is widespread popular opposition to it.

How about a front page science story that doesn’t give 99% of the coverage to absurd ideas?

What is it with Channel 4 and the examination of excretions? During How Toxic Are Your Kids (C4, Thurs 8pm) I had to check the television guide to make sure that Armando Iannucci (The Day Today, Brass Eye) wasn’t the producer. Apparently, this is episode two of two, and I’m so disappointed that I missed the first episode. The programme opens with presenter, Sarah Beeny, telling us that “on an average day alone, I’m exposed to over a thousand chemicals.” This is episode two: we’re onto the advanced level stuff. A token ounce of sense — “… natural chemicals (some good and some bad)” — is voice-overed in at one point, but mostly, “chemical” is a synonym for “toxin” and “natural” is a synonym for “healthy”. Indeed, the disclaimer comes after telling us that “prior to the 1950s, we only used natural chemicals.” There’s no evidence for this obviously nonsensical statement, but it’s a fact.

As is standard for mid-evening television “journalism”, we meet some wonderful characters. It’s so much easier to talk to some ordinary people — who are all very willing to play along, in return for their fifteen minutes — than to do some research, or find out some facts. There is the Scottish woman whose interior decoration mimics a neoclassical museum, and who has a selection of air fresheners in every room. “Some people might think it’s a bit excessive,” she tells us. The voice-over comes in with the fact that people who use air fresheners are more likely to suffer regularly from headaches, but the science behind this fact is never explained: do the chemicals in the air fresheners cause the headaches, or are headaches another symptom of the psychoses that these people are clearly suffering from? Journalists these days are so thorough in their investigating that they conduct studies and experiments. The data point in this experiment is a teenage girl who has her make-up and shampoo taken away, in return for some “natural” products. “Everyone’s looking at me like, ‘she’s so ugly’.” No, dear, they’re looking at you like, “look at that girl being exploited by that film crew.” This is a scientific experiment, remember, and so an objective measure for results is required, and since it’s Channel 4, it has to involve analysing waste. But this crew is amateur: they stop at urine, rather going the whole Gillian McKeith. Then there’s the family that won’t eat any cooked food. “Don’t you ever just think, ‘oh, I really want some soup right now’?” Wow, yeah, soup. That’s exactly what I’d miss most if I gave up cooked food.

Pick a light-factual television programme from the archives and it should be possible to date it to within five years of its production merely by looking at the graphics. Graphics go through fashions, influenced by the latest technology. This one makes wonderful use of the virtual studio to create an amusing series of split screen scenes, for example. Either they just had so much to say and so little time that they had to resort to having two streams of information running at the same time, or it was simply the case that the presenter (left) was just so bored by what the scientist (right) was telling us that she had given up and was putting on her make-up instead. Another ubiquitous gimmick is to deliberately make the picture look bad. Bad picture quality is a way of immediately telling us “this is an informal ‘diary’ scene”: they’re the quality you’d get from cheap cameras of the variety one would use for home videos, or outside broadcasts from a cash strapped production company. Except they’re not. Cheap cameras have moved on since the early 1990s, but apparently, our expectations of picture quality haven’t kept up.

Everyone knows that alongside spectroscopic analysis of bodily productions, the way to do research is to conduct surveys. To the street! We get a montage of the people, who, after telling us that they never read the shampoo ingredients label (no shit, really?), all tell us that what they really want is more “natural”, “pure”, “essential oils” and “organic”. “It says 100% pure, therefore I know everything in there is going to be beneficial to me.” The presenter tells us: “nature is powerful stuff.” Yeah. As powerfully capable of harming us as synthetic chemicals. Still, it’s no good just telling us how bad chemicals are, clearly there is a demand for alternatives! “Although the levels of these chemicals aren’t considered dangerous, I’m going to see if I can reduce them.” And so, we get Aloe Vera for breakfast, and salt & lemon juice toothpaste. This is not science, it’s not journalism, and it’s not consumer advocacy. It’s classic infotainment. If Channel Four News is The Guardian of the television medium, the mid-evening slot is the Daily Mail. It’s not just health scares; it’s health scares with “kids” in the headline.

I’ve heard it said several times. Usually it’s when I scold an acquaintance for being in possession of a copy. They will say something like, “I only bought it because it’s a convenient size,” or, “I just found it on the bus,” or, “it belongs to my grandmother, who supported Hitler during the war — she’ll be dead soon, so it’s OK.”

“Oh lighten up, it’s just a bit of fun,” they will sometimes say. “Of course every word of it is bullshit, but everyone knows that, so it can’t do any harm.”

Trouble is, that isn’t true. Sure everyone knows that everything in the Daily Mail is bullshit, but they don’t realise that this is because the DM has made it up. Take last week’s story, “Men who don’t find curvy women attractive ‘could father children with autism’.” (I know, I know, the DM has surpassed itself. It is beyond parody.) The readers in the comments thread are not so thoroughly witless that they can not see immediately that what they are being delivered by the DM is the purest grade ‘A’ Colombian bullshit. They are as outraged as I am — more so, as evidenced by their hurried comments, sent without time to proofread their words for spelling, flow or sanity. But to whom is the blame always assigned?

What upper poppycock! Whoever gave them a research grant to carry out such a study needs their head read…As do the researchers. However did they dream up the idea? How did they make this link? Are they saying there is something wrong with men who fancy thin women?

- Suzanne, Dorchester

Utter nonsense – and more wasted money spent on useless research. I think the university researchers just create the headlines themselves just to keep themselves in work.

- DBA, Crediton, Devon

What I want to know is who the hell thinks up these studies and who funds them and exactly what is this supposed to prove anyway?? Dont marry an athleticly framed woman as you will havel autistic children??

- Colette, Bowmanville Ontario, Canada

sigh

Cognitive dissonance: “I couldn’t have such consistently bad judgement as to subscribe to a newspaper with such a transparently and humiliatingly pisspoor excuse for journalism as this, therefore, the journalism must be good and the source of the bullshit must be the scientists.”

These people are considered qualified to vote, and their beliefs eventually influence research funding. The next step is politicians standing up to mock scientists for their interest in fruit flies.

There are differing opinions in the blogosphere over the merits of calling out bullshit. Does one feed the troll? Is it ever acceptable to sink to ad hominin attacks?

I try to stay civil, and I try to resist commenting on every bad article and news report. But I make no apologies when it comes to this:

A teenage girl in central India killed herself after being traumatised by media reports that a ‘Big Bang’ experiment in Europe could bring about the end of the world, her father said.

Oh. Well done, media.

The Daily Mail, of course, has been trolling the country since before “trolling” was even coined. The readers’ comments are performing as usual:

How devastating for this girl’s family. However, I am surprised that there has only been one reported case like this. Whoever is responsible (or should I say, irresponsible) for allowing this circus to continue should hang their heads in shame.

What a fine, democratic world we live in, where secret experiments costing billions and endangering humanity can be allowed to be devised with absolutely no consultation of the public whatsoever.

- Sara, Paris, France, 11/9/2008 9:40

Secret experiment? What kind of fucktard are you, Sara? Other than that, you make an excellent point here: the writers of the Daily Mail, and other irresponsible elements in the media, should hang their heads.

This was just the start of the trial and by no means the BIG BANG. This will come in a few weeks time when the huge explosion actually occurs–not to mention the after effects of the black hole atoms reproducing at an alarming rate which will effect us in a few years time. God bless her.

- Jane, SPAIN, 11/9/2008 9:04

Hi, Jane! If I were you, I’d be more worried about your immense density attracting celestial objects or knocking the Earth out of its orbit. Perhaps CERN’s scientists could be profitably employed investigating how it affects the curvature of space-time?

I don’t want to dwell on this. I’m repulsing myself by participating in this point-scoring match over one person’s personal tragic tale. Which is perhaps why I find this foul attempt at smearing science so outrageous.

So, the following video was brought to my attention, and I was so impressed that I had to share. Admittedly, it took me some time to getting around to the sharing bit: it’s difficult to find the motivation for an argument as patently absurd as that over gun ownership.

That YouTube gun video

This is truly the most marvelous case study in rhetoric that I’ve seen all year. For those Americans who are unfamiliar with contemporary (and recent historical) British politics and society, allow me to dissect for you some of the more remarkable examples.

The video starts with Britain’s “largest peacetime protest” (the untruth in this statement is only trivial). Primed with a title containing the word “guns”, American viewers could be forgiven for assuming this protest had something to do with guns. It did not. The law was about hunting with dogs.

“Many are asking: where were these voices six years ago, when there was an outright ban on handguns?” Indeed. The fox hunters were largely apathetic towards a ban on handguns because you don’t hunt foxes with handguns; but they got upset about the ban on hunting with dogs because they like hunting with dogs. Hence the protest regarding hunting with dogs, and the absence of the protest about owning handguns. Do you see?

But why was there so little opposition to the tightening of laws on handgun ownership? Because they came in the wake of the mass-murder of children with legally owned handguns. You can argue that this was an irrational reason to ban handguns, but it’s the answer you’re looking for.

“There has been a forty percent increase in gun crime since the law was introduced…” Wow. Crime statistics rise when something goes from being legal to illegal. I guess the ban on smoking in pubs and restaurants has similarly failed, since we’ve seen an increase in illegal smoking. This factoid is mediocre and meaningless: what do the real outcomes look like?

“The use of weapons in crime has risen dramatically,” says Frank Cook MP. Actually, lets listen to that that again: “The use of weapons in crime has risen dramatically” (his emphasis, not mine). That presumably includes knife crime, the big one as far as popular discourse in the UK is concerned (though that too is largely a media fabrication, and the data demonstrate a falling rate of violent crime). I’ve no idea what Frank Cook’s views on handgun ownership are, so I quickly searchedTheyWorkForYou .com for Frank+Cook+gun and, so far as I can tell, he has mentioned guns once in parliament during the timeTheyWorkForYou.com has been tracking debates. In a November 2005 session, Cook mentioned, as an aside, that the post-Dunblaine restrictions on gun ownership were knee-jerk. And he’s right. But it doesn’t paint a picture of a man tirelessly crusading for a fundamental right on which our safety and liberty depends.

More soundbites: police morale is “at an all time low.” Wow. I didn’t even know there was an objective rolling record of police “morale”! Police morale has been a little low lately: they have a pay dispute. Not a gun dispute, you understand. A pay dispute. Police safety (and rate of assaults against police officers, which is a slightly different question) is an empirical question which is not measured in “morale”.

Next it’s over to Tony Martin — the poor defenceless old farmer who shot violent intruders in self-defence. Er… yeah. Not the Tony Martin with paranoid personality disorder who shot a fleeing teenager dead, hid the weapon, and went to the pub, then? Tony Martin is not a good poster boy for the right to bear arms.

–

I don’t think we saw a single datum in the video. There were a lot of anecdotes and soundbites, a lot of selective footage and an absurdly crude misrepresentation of the situation in the UK. But the issue surely just rests on empirical questions? Where are the data on this issue? Well, so far as I have been able to ascertain — and it’s difficult to be sure of anything on the topic when there are two polarised dogmas desperate to make the loudest and most preposterous noise — neither side have much going for them. Being armed does nothing to make you measurably safer; but then, neither does a gun ban or amnesty. Arguments on this issue tend to be about simple solutions to complex social problems, and each side seem quite content to defend their positions with arguments as flawed as those above. They’re the best arguments they’ve got.

I’ve just been listening to this evening’s Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4. The programme was titled “The Infidelity Gene”, and the panelists tried to deduce morality and the answer to the question “does free will exist” from a single piece of behavioural genetics research that they’d been given third hand from a newspaper which reported an overheard conversation about a genetics book. Needless to say, it wasn’t very good. The main reason it wasn’t very good is the presence of a Daily Mail journalist named Melanie Phillips on the panel, who clearly wasn’t qualified to be participating in the discussion.

The programme started with a few sound bytes by each member of the panel of Melanie Phillips, Claire Fox, Michael Gove and the biologist Steve Rose. Phillips began by making some noise about determinism as though genes having an influence over behaviour was somehow more deterministic than environmental and cultural determinism. Rose was very good and pointed out that genes and environment can not be separated and rather work together, that we know genes influence behaviour but that doesn’t mean culture doesn’t. Unfortunately, either by free will or some determining factor, Rose managed to forget all this for the rest of the programme, and went accusing all the guest scientists of being extreme nativists.

The first guest was Prof Tim Spector who talked a bit of dummed down behavioural genetics. Spector didn’t appear to be used to talking about behavioural genetics to people who aren’t familiar with the field because he didn’t really explain things very well, especially heritability. Spector was talking about studies which show a high heritability for things like racism and religiosity, which means that a large proportion of the variation in such traits can be attributed to variation in genotype. Heritability has very limited use, and is complex and easy to misunderstand. Spector set himself up for attacks by Melanie Phillips who thought Spector was saying that Racism is entirely genetically determined. It’s obvious that society has a big effect on whether you are racist, says Phillips, and Spector agrees, he never said it didn’t. Phillips is confused, she clearly didn’t understand Rose when he demolished Nature vs Nurture in his opening speech. Rose, however, knows exactly what Heritability means and how useful it is. Rose surely knows that Spector isn’t Phillip’s straw man? Nope. Rose plays along with it. Why?

The next guest is a Christian ethicist Dr Elaine Storkey. It’s a programme about morals and whether free will exists, she might have something relevant to say. No, she opens by talking about how genes play a big role in physiology, but none in behaviour, that genetics has nothing to contribute to psychology, that behavioural geneticists are fantasists and have no scientific evidence. She shows right from the beginning that she has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about. She makes all of the mistakes of Phillips and more. Nature and nurture are separate, genes are deterministic (but not culture?), the “hypothetical” genes limit freedom not give freedom. But even better: REDUCTIONISM! Genetics is reductionistic, and what can reductionism tell us? But remember, she opened her segment by praising the application of genetics to physiology and medicine. So, genetics is useful when applied to the body but not the mind? The reductionism cry is one of the worst of the collection of crap arguments reserved for political arguments against good science.

Prof Nicholas Humphrey is next. Here we have an evolutionary psychologist who does know what he’s talking about, and does so quite well. Humphrey opens by showing that genes do not determine our behaviour at all, they give us possibilities, a powerful brain, capable of learning and absorbing culture, but also built with innate desires and talents. Humphrey and Rose discuss heritability and finally actually explain what it means, hinting at how genes and environment interact by saying that heritability changes depending on circumstance, but unfortunately not discussing it further. Rose agrees that genes and environment interact to produce the mind, but objects to Humphrey’s extension into Evolutionary Psychology, by once again attacking a straw man of evolutionary psychology. Phillips doesn’t have anything to add, but tries to anyway. People’s religious beliefs change during their lifetimes, so genes can’t have anything to do with religiosity. Phillips appears to think that genes can only act deterministically, that genes can only act in the growing brain, that they do not continue to act throughout life, and that genes react to the environment and even culture.

Next up is a philosopher of science, who talks about free will, something I’ll avoid comment on, due to my own ignorance of the subject. Phillips should also have avoided comment, she knew even less.

The programme ends with some 24 carrot fashionable nonsense from Phillips. Genetics and evolutionary psychology are pseudoscience, not science. Genes are a concept. The proteins in DNA exist (I’d jesteringly suggest that she means histones), but that genes produce phenotypes are just a concept thought up by scientists. A fantasy. The concept gene is derived from the fact that we behave in different ways and scientists make assumptions from different groups with no evidence. Fox thinks man is perfectible, and we can overcome our biology, which limits us. Rose finishes with another one of those statements he keeps making that show that he accepts entirely that genes play a very important role in behaviour, which is why it’s so confusing that he attacks a determinist straw man of evolutionary psychology: genes give us freedom.