Lazy Journalism (not my own, some one elses)
I LOVE TABLOIDS! and I mean it in a non sarcastic way, I truly do love tabloids. No its not for the way that they promote homo/xenophobia or that they give masses of people something they can actually read and in the process giving them a glimmer of hope that they may have more than one brain cell where in fact all that they will then do is go forth into the world and spit out false facts and figures as though they have carried out research themselves and by reading their daily paper they have become an authority of some kind *takes a breath.* Well actually it is for all of those reasons and then the arrogant smug feeling i get in my belly afterwards that I am some how better (I know its pompous but it doesn’t happen often please dont judge me.)
What has sparked this though I hear you ask. Well it come from an article on the Guardian website where the journalist had seen a tale in a tabloid about a ‘Doctor’ who has linked the high suicide rate in the Welsh town of Bridgend to the fact that people there live a little closer to mobile phone transmitters than the UK average. All hunky dory you would think, it could be true, who knows what those radio signals are doing to the mushy masses in our heads. However this brave journalist though no! This must be all kinds of bullshit and phoned Mister scientist dude who it turns out had ‘lost the research’ so could not give any more details but was offering a £150 gadget which you could carry about on your person to stop you from being infected by the evil evil rays. After deeper investigating Guardian journalist also uncovered that this same dude (who also turned out not to be an actual doctor) was also claiming that AIDS infection rates were higher where there are more masts…well duh, there are only more masts in places where there are more people e.g. a city so of course infection rates are going to be higher than in the outback, duh.
In conclusion, lazy journalism is bad but funny when some one comes along and pokes alot of holes in it.
