Errors

As StinkyJournalism wrote previously, photo galleries of bizarre medical conditions or injuries do not make ethical medical journalism.  But following on ABC's footsteps, FOX News is now running a gallery of images of "outrageous" injuries. Is it an adjunct to some illustrative medical reporting? They do not say. In the “Outrageous Injuries” photo gallery text, FOX offers no reporting of substance, calling into question the news value and ethical...Go to full story

This week (through Sunday, February 28) NewsTrust, a public journalism rating site, is hosting a hunt for bad journalism. Working with students from a class at Stanford University, the NewsTrust blog will feature a new set of bad stories every day, seeking viewer participation to rate the site's choices as well as suggest others. The blog announced the hunt Monday, saying the exercise is intended to “highlight journalism with serious flaws: news reports and opinions that...Go to full story

A violent gun battle erupted in the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea (SHP PNG)...not really.

Even though this bloodbath did not occur, Reuters, the AFP and many other outlets reported the violent clash January 25 which they claimed resulted in 11 deaths and was linked to an Exxon Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project.

On January 26, Stinky Journalism contacted Jeffrey Elapa, a journalist for The National newspaper in...Go to full story

This week, the UK Press Complaints Commission decided to reject complaints against Jan Moir’s obituary of Stephen Gately, leader of the hugely popular "boyband" Boyzone who died October 10.

Much like the noisy response StinkyJournalism reported over Moir’s piece in the Daily Mail last October, a wealth of commentary has followed the PCC’s decision this week. As StinkyJournalism wrote, Moir’s column spurred a record...Go to full story

In a Feb. 15 post, blogger Rob Pitingolo complains about a front-page story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The story, "Cleveland named worst winter city as storm bears down on Northeast Ohio," cited a Forbes report naming Cleveland number one in their ranking of  "America's Worst Winter Weather Cities" list. Though Pitingolo targets the Plain Dealer for rebuke, Forbes itself seems to have made the more important errors here. Though it may be...Go to full story

As errors go, scientific and mathematical ones are often some of the easiest for journalists to make.

Writers, more often trained in the humanities, might be forgiven for messing up science stories they themselves don’t really understand.

But ignorance is a poor excuse for truly basic errors because accuracy is arguably even more important in math and science than it is, for example, in name spelling. (Consider the difference between...Go to full story

Last weekend saw a gathering of scientists and journalists for the fourth annual ScienceOnline conference, with several workshops focused on online science journalism. One participant, Janet D. Stemwedel, who writes the blog Adventures in Ethics and Science, posted a rundown of her tweeted notes from a panel on fact checking science stories Sunday. It looks like the discussion hit on some good tips. According to the description of the panel on the conference website, “Much...Go to full story

We’ve written before about disappointing science journalism that endangers health, or sticks too closely to press releases, or creates a false balance, or sensationalizes.

But even in these stories, we expect that the reporter at least represented the basic research itself. Not so for a recent psychology story in Britain's Sunday Times, “Blonde women born to be warrior princesses,” which went beyond spinning the science, to actually reporting the...Go to full story

A planned byline strike at the Minneapolis Star Tribune began as scheduled Tuesday, January 26. CityPages, a Minneapolis/St. Paul news blog, reports no stories in the Star Tribune will carry an author’s byline as employees protest the impending loss of almost 30 newsroom jobs, including a slew of the newspaper’s copy editors. In lieu of copy editors, the Star Tribune plans to rely on a new mandate for writers and editors to start using spellcheck software to catch...Go to full story

TPM recently called out dozens of media outlets for continuing an unsubstantiated story that Umar Abdulmutallab--the man who allegedly tried to blow up Flight 253 in Detroit--was traveling on a one-way ticket from Nigeria to the United States. According to TPM, the “one-way ticket” story has been “referenced repeatedly by commentators attacking the U.S. government for missing red flags about Abdulmutallab,” (like this Michael Gerson column in the Jan. 6...Go to full story