I have to admit, that from time to time a headline from a supposedly newsworthy source really grabs my attention. This particular one from the Paris-based AFP (Agence France-Presse) certainly did. But it wasn’t the one above, and if you have bothered to read this far, here is the link to the article that got my attention.
“Sexual extravagance can be deadly: study” might grab anyone’s attention or is it just me? Well anyway, the article, badly written as it is, must not have been written by someone steeped in scientific reporting, as confusing as it seemed to me, errors notwithstanding. Perhaps it was the reporter’s first assignment. Well, if he/she wanted to garner clicks for AFP (maybe clicks are how they evaluate their reporters) they got mine, but the reaction is not what they may have intended.
Note: The day after the above report was released, it was also reported (various sources) that the AFP CEO, Emmanuel Hoog will step down from his role as CEO. The Board of Directors –including the French government–did not renew his contract for another five years. Could the article above be a reason for Mr. Hoog’s extinction from AFP?
Next, I checked out the journal Nature, and found a far better news report of the actual study, perhaps because it was a news report from the same journal. The article is here:
Ostracods Shortcut Cocktail Parties to Extinction!
This was a far better summary of the study, offering more pertinent detail, such as a specific reference location in Eastern Mississippi, possible implications of the findings, etc. But having gotten this far, I was struck by the narrowness of the study and therefore the implications of its results.
The author of the above advanced a relatively new concept called “experimental evolution” which suggested that natural selection might not be all that it is cracked up to be if it allows for the eventual extinction of species. Or does it? Now, I am getting really confused.
So, I clicked on the hyperlink in this article and arrived at the actual abstract of the study, hyperlinked here:
I did not go beyond this abstract, not wanting to pay $8.99 for the privilege of reading how some ostracod species may through their own evolution, have created their own extinction and what may be generalized into theories about the evolutionary behavior of other species (only ostracods or perhaps even humans) from the results of this study. Instead, I want to return to the AFP byline.
If anyone wants to know just how sloppy journalism has gotten, they need go no further than the AFP article that set me on this clambake. This is compounded of course by the immediacy of posting something (Fleet Street and hard copy are as good as extinct) and then in turn sharing it like I am here. I bet the AFP article author regrets the use of “to” twice in the opening sentence, but unless they sneak back to edit this article, it is in cyberspace for as long as ostracod extinctions.
In journalism you don’t even have to be biased politically to create “fake news”; sloppiness will often have the same effect.
