Ben Goldacre deplores the reluctance of newspapers to link to original sources and then demonstrates why they don’t:
Professor Anna Ahn published a paper recently, showing that people with shorter heels have larger calves. For the Telegraph this became “Why stilletos are the secret to shapely legs”, for the Mail “Stilletos give women shapelier legs than flats”, for the Express “Stilletos tone up your legs”.
But anybody who read even the press release, which is a readable piece of popular science itself, would immediately see that this study had nothing whatsoever to do with shoes. It didn’t look at shoe heel height, it looked at anatomical heel length, the distance from the back of your ankle joint to the insertion of the Achilles tendon. The participants were all barefoot. It was just an interesting nerdy insight into how the human body is engineered: if you have a shorter lever at the back of your foot, you need a bigger muscle in your calf.
Once more, this story was a concoction by journalists, but more than that, no sane journalist could possibly have risked writing the story about stilletos, if they’d linked to the press release: they’d have looked like idiots, and fantasists, to anyone who bothered to click.
Quite. But there are many pages to fill (one reason why newspapers might be better if they were slimmer) and you’ve got to fill them with something. Every day. If that means coming up with some nonsense or repackaging a press release as “news” then so be it. It’s true, and unfortunate, that doing so ruins your credibility with anyone who actually knows anything about the subject under discussion and that this leads people to question the accuracy of reporting on matters about which the poor, gentle reader knows little and that this in turn undermines the credibility and authority a proper newspaper needs and, slowly but certainly, reduces the incentive to actually purchase the inky rag but time is short, deadlines are unyielding and an empty page looks very silly indeed.
“Will this do?” is often the question and the answer is even more commonly “Not really, but it will have to.”
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