Originally Posted by The Chicago Tribune
Media's Top 10 whopper list
Dennis Byrne, a Chicago-area writer and consultant
Published January 3, 2005
Unfortunately, the list of the media's 10 worst scare stories in 2004 already had closed before Reuters made a late, hard charge for the dubious honor. Even while bodies still were washing ashore, the news service cited unnamed "experts" who blamed global warming for some of the devastation caused by the Indian Ocean tsunami.
Alister Doyle, Reuters' environment correspondent, warned last week that, in effect, you ain't seen nothing yet. Entire islands and millions people could disappear beneath the seas because "scientists say" atmospheric gases heated from burning fossil fuels "threaten to trigger more powerful storms and raise sea levels, exposing coasts to more erosion."
Never mind that global warming is a raging debate among scientists. For now, the theory is unproven enough that I suggest Reuters get a special late-arrival medallion in the Dubious Data Awards for 2004. The list, issued annually by the Statistical Assessment Service in Washington, D.C., memorializes the media's worst mathematical or scientific mistakes--the nonexistent epidemics, cancer scares and other horrors that make life "sound scarier, more dangerous or just more confusing than it really is."
In other words, the media, which love to print year-end lists that zap others, come in for a taste of their own. STATS, a non-profit, non-partisan organization, tries to head off journalistic abuse of science and statistics before people and public policy fall victim to the distortions. Sometimes they arrive too late.
Remember the report that obesity would soon kill more people than smoking? The report came up No. 4 on STATS' list because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's estimate of deaths was 80,000 too high, thanks to mathematical errors and bad data.
Sure, the media can't verify every scary report that crosses their desks (although they might look a little closer at the ones they publish). But sometimes the media can create errors and bad data on their own. For example, the TV networks suggested that Sen. John Kerry beat President Bush, based on exit polling flawed by skewed sampling and computer failures. Sadly, this came after the networks revamped their exit polling operation after blowing it the last two elections. Good try, but it earns No. 3 on the STATS list.
While on the subject of the election, remember "the orgy of journalistic breast-beating" about the media ignoring the importance of moral values? So, I and others get first runner-up for not recognizing that "moral values" is a "very general category." When voters were asked to be more specific (e.g. taxes and terrorism), the importance of "moral values" slipped.
Rushing ahead, in reverse:
10. Employee and job-applicant use of meth "soared 68 percent last year." Actually, the increase came on a small base of just 1.9 meth users per 1,000. In other words, the vast majority of job applicants and workers were clean.
9. "Oil prices soar to record highs!" Except that the real (inflation-adjusted) record was set in 1981, when oil hit $66 a barrel in today's prices.
8. NBC's "Today" show reported 58,000 children were kidnapped annually, as if they were being snatched by strangers, to be killed, abused or ransomed. Actually, there were only 115 such cases. The rest involved runaways, absences of less than an hour (43 percent of those missing) and abductions by non-strangers.
7. "Workplace stress" costs more than $300 billion annually! Maybe not quite. This well-publicized guess was based on an outdated book whose author warned against trying to guess the cost of chronic stress--and then guessed anyway.
6. Don't eat "farmed" salmon, because it can cause cancer. Sadly, many neglected to report that the study said you'd have to eat eight ounces of raw salmon each month for 70 years to have a 1-in-100,000 risk of cancer. In the same vein, phthalates--chemicals found in everything from nail polish to toys--were widely reported to cause cancer and birth defects. But the rats in the study absorbed the human equivalent of 4.5 bottles of nail polish every day for 70 years to become ill. The reporting also ignored many other studies finding phthalates safe in toys and cosmetics. Give it fifth place.
Now for the worst, the "Who's Stupid Now?" award. Topping the list are those who reported that states with the highest "average IQs" voted for 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, and that the dummies in lower IQ states voted for President Bush. Good story, but it was an Internet hoax, bought wholesale by even the distinguished Economist magazine. The St. Petersburg Times gets a special citation for publishing the "data" on the same day that a red-faced Economist issued a retraction.
To me and my colleagues, nice going.
