Environmental Law

A case of never letting the source spoil a good story | Ben Goldacre | Comment is free | The Guardian

By STEPHEN HOLZER

This week the Telegraph ran the headline "Wind farms blamed for stranding of whales". It continued: "Offshore wind farms are one of the main reasons why whales strand themselves on beaches, according to scientists studying the problem." Lady Warsi even cited this as fact on the BBC's Question Time this week, while arguing against wind farms.

But anyone who read the open-access academic paper in PLoS One, titled "Beaked whales respond to simulated and actual navy sonar", would see that the study looked at sonar and didn't mention wind farms at all. At our most generous, the Telegraph story was a spectacular and bizarre exaggeration of a brief contextual aside about general levels of manmade sound in the ocean by one author at the end of the press release (titled "Whales 'scared' by sonars").

...

Lastly, on Wednesday the Daily Mail ran with the scare headline "Swimming too often in chlorinated water 'could increase risk of developing bladder cancer', claim scientists". There's little point in documenting the shortcomings of Mail health stories any more, but suffice to say, while the story purported to describe a study in the journal Environmental Health, anyone who read the original paper, or even the press release, would see immediately that bladder cancer wasn't measured, and the Mail's story was a simple distortion

via www.guardian.co.uk

The Guardian is, generally, a far-left news organization and I don't usually trust the source; but this particular article has a point.

Full post as published by Environmental Legal Blogs on March 21, 2011 (boomark / email).