Thursday, June 05, 2014

Quality reporting


It would seem that the good old Daily Mail is up to it's usual tricks, completely inverting the truth of something in order to score cheap popularity points with it's readership; who (judging from the comments at least) seem to fall for it hook line and sinker. Poor old Dicky Dawkins is getting it in the neck for supposedly making a comment at the Cheltenham Science Festival along the lines that fairy tales and believing in Santa causes children harm, you can imagine the headline... "Dawkins wants to ban Christmas", "Dawkins the grinch". Disappointingly I heard the same story repeated on radio 4 this morning on my way to work and I'm sure there are many who would love to believe it; headlines like this confirm their pre-existing prejudices about him and scientists in general, and lets face it, much like immigrants and benefits cheats the Daily Mail in particular thrives on this kind of confirmation bias. In reality though this reported position really doesn't square with what the man actually says.

A couple of years ago he wrote a whole book on myths and legends, comparing and contrasting them with scientific explanations for things (like evolution, cosmology, physics, geology, chemistry etc.), it's a nice book, aimed at 12 year olds and has even been turned into an iPad application. Over and over again the book describes his view on myths and legends, that they can be beautiful, poetic, descriptive and useful in the teaching of morality. This morning he has been tweeting what he actually said, i.e. the exact opposite of what the article claims, i.e. that fairy tales are charming and useful tool in helping children grasp the basics of critical thinking from an early age. From my own experience with my own children this is exactly right, Santa Claus, three little pigs, goldilocks (among many other stories) are great vehicles with which to delight them in their early years and educate them later on as they become able to reason about reality and understand the underlying "human" truths in such stories (many of which are extremely unpleasant!). I suppose the old adage about no news being bad news may have a ring of truth to it; but then again, we all know the moral of a Daily Mail story don't we children...

Update: if you want to listen to what Dawkins actually thinks about myths and fairy tales then listen here..

4 comments:

A Heron's View said...

I don't believe that the Daily Mail is the only newspaper that practices subterfuge by way of exaggerations, scandal-mongering and sensationalism.
The majority of them have their eye on increasing the sales of their newsprint at the expense of truth.

Steve Borthwick said...

HV, no but the Daily Mail seems to have perfected the art.

Chairman Bill said...

The Daily Mail is a myth.

Steve Borthwick said...

CB, Quality reporting at the Daily Mail is certainly a myth!