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leviathan0999
leviathan0999  · Io9.com
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This is an incredibly important news story.What’s important about it is not that chocolate really doesn’t help weight-loss.What’s important about it is that it exposes the unholy alliance of junk science and journalistic malpractice that fill our newspapers, magazines, telecasts and online journalistic sites with an almost-daily serving of utter nonsense that goes unexamined and unchecked in both senses of the word.Is salt good or bad for you? How about fat? What are the real health impacts of obesity? You can give any answer to any of those questions, and find published studies, promoted by mainstream journalism, to back it up. In truth, you may think you know the answers to those questions and a zillion others, but if you do, it’s almost certainly co-incidence, and there’s no finding out for sure with intensive in-depth research that is beyond most lay people.Twitter and other online sources (because print sources haven’t really had to time to start their engines yet) have been furious in their denunciation… Not of the junk science and hapless, careless, feckless and incompetent journalists, but of John Bohannon, the scientist and science writer who worked with a German TV news outfit to create a deliberately-flawed and scientifically-meaningless study, and then have it published in a “real” but clearly bogus scientific journal, which published it without peer review or any vetting other than making sure the author’s check cleared, after which the journalistic team promoted the worthless study in exactly the way junk science is always promoted, and the manstream media covered it exactly as they always do.This infuriates me. Denouncing John Bohannon for this is blaming your oncologist because you’ve got cancer.I see this again and again, and it always infuriates me.Last summer when I actively supported the employees and customers of the “Market Basket” supermarket chain working to prevent a takeover that would boost their prices and harm the community.The CEOs brought in to run the company by the people who were taking it over fired the leaders of the striking employees, who had made public the new management’s plans to raise prices (not to meet costs, but literally just to increase their personal profits,) claiming that in doing so, those employees had harmed the reputation of the company.No. Making public that your employers are doing something sleazy doesn’t harm your employers’ reputation. Your employers doing something sleazy is what harms it.Well, John Bohannon running and publicizing a junk-science study in exactly the way junk science is normally done, so he could report on what he did, does not harm public trust in science and science reporting.The way junk science is normally done and publicized harms public trust in science and science reporting, and as long as these practices continue, that reputation is in real need of being harmed. While the scientific community refuses to police itself and loudly discredit junk science when it happens, while news outlets join in the game of spreading the crap instead of rooting it out and revealing it, the public should trust neither. #john #bohannon #Chocolate #Weight #Loss #Study #io9.com #junk #science #journalistic #malpractice #blaming #the #messenger #hate #the #game ... See more
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