Bad Science: Jeremy Laurance Is An Angry Man

“Churnalism” – reporters turning out copy direct from press conferences and releases, without checking, to feed the insatiable news machine

By Curmudgeon

On the general WCF topic of press-release journalism and not checking facts: found on line a new term for it: "churnalism." Here's the quote:

Goldacre is right to highlight the fact that there is too much “churnalism” – reporters turning out copy direct from press conferences and releases, without checking, to feed the insatiable news machine.

Churnalism. I like it. Of course, found it in a long screed by a writer for The Guardian, who argues that it's not a reporters' job to fact check claims made by people they interview. Uh huh.

Anyway, found it on the badscience blog site:

• Jeremy Laurance is an angry man

Editor's addendum: Dan Schroeder also has a related article on his Dan's Diary Blog, which deals generally with fraudulent numeracy, but also touches upon our home town newspaper's ever too frequent "churnalistic," "news reporting" transgressions:

• Detecting Bad Data

From Dan's article, here's the money quote:

At the local level, relying on a single authority is the rule rather than the exception. The Ogden Standard-Examiner almost always prints the word of local government officials as if it were fact, with no questions asked. Despite the detailed exposés on Weber County Forum, the Standard-Examiner has yet to report that the Ogden government manipulated its crime statistics, or that the government’s revenue projections for the Junction development were fraudulently overblown.

Comments, anyone?