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March 14, 2005
This is Reporting? More like Plagiarism
Take a look at this AP article that was on Wizbang today. Then go read this press release from the World Wide Fund for Nature. Notice any similarities? That’s because out of 8 paragraphs in the AP “article,” 7 are copied nearly verbatim from the press release. The other paragraph is the summary at the beginning of the article. I read both carefully, and noted that the only changes were punctuation, the rewording of a few sentences to make them simpler, and the substitutions of spellings, scientific units, and a few word to make them more understandable to American audiences. In fact, the only really substantive difference is the change of “the report shows” to “the report says.” Even then, it’s hard to tell if the “reporter” is really trying to point out the difference between what is just said and what is really shown.
Have another careful read of the AP article. Notice anything else? The article never mentions a single thing about a press release. I have no problem with news organizations reprinting press releases, but they need to SAY that they are press releases. The fact that this “article” is missing that little detail implies that the reporter actually read the report or interviewed someone that had.
And while we’re on the subject, I simply can not believe that reporters who report on these sorts of things can’t have just a little bit of training in the fallacies of statistics and logic, read the reports themselves, and then report on what they actually say. I can do that, it’s not hard; all it takes is a little time and a sharp open mind. Or they could at least consult someone who can do this. This is why people turn to the blogosphere. Wizbang points out that they only tend to provide critical reporting when the report supports conservative ideals.
As we saw last week, what someone says a study says is often very different from what it actually says.
Now I don’t have time to read the 80 page report myself, though I did read the introduction, so I can’t say whether it is accurate or not. However, the introduction certainly seems to take a more sedate tone as to whether or not the climate changes it tracks are due to man-caused global warming or not. It even notes that:
Climatic changes and its impacts on the fluctuation of glaciers are a natural phenomenon that has been occurring in the Earth’s five billion-year-old history.
In comparison, here is this sentence from the WWF press release.
WWF calls on all governments to recognize that global average temperature must stay below 2°C (3.6°F) in comparison to pre-industrial levels.
This seems to show that the people who write press releases for their organizations don’t even read their own reports. If they did, they might realize that it is ridiculous to call for governments to attempt to hold the Earth’s temperature at a certain point, seeing as how global changes have been occurring for billions of years and, despite the claims of some people, it is impossible to determine how much humans, as opposed to natural causes, have affected recent climate changes.
Posted by illuminaria at March 14, 2005 02:16 PM