Why don’t journalists link to primary sources? Whether it’s a press release, an academic journal article, a formal report, or even the full transcript of an interview, the primary source contains more information for interested readers: it shows your working, and it allows people to check whether what you wrote is true. Here are three short stories.
This week the Telegraph ran the headline ‘Wind farms blamed for stranding of whales’. ‘Offshore wind farms are one of the main reasons why whales strand themselves on beaches, according to scientists studying the problem,’ it continued. Baroness Warsi even cited the story on BBC Question Time this week, arguing against wind farms.
But anyone who read the open-access academic paper in PLoS One, titled ‘Beaked Whales Respond to Simulated and Actual Navy Sonar’, would see that the study looked at sonar, and didn’t mention wind farms at all. At best, the Telegraph story was a massive exaggeration of one brief, contextual aside about general levels of manmade sound in the ocean, made by one author at the end of the press release (titled ‘Whales Scared by Sonars’). This release didn’t mention wind farms, and it didn’t say they were ‘one of the main reasons why whales strand themselves on beaches’. Anyone reading the press release could see that the study was about naval sonar.
This Telegraph article (now deleted, with a miserly correction) was a distortion, perhaps driven by the paper’s odd editorial line about the environment. But there is a bigger fish here: if we had a culture of linking to primary sources – if they were always just a click away – then shame alone would probably have stopped it going online. Outright misrepresentations are only worth risking in an environment where the reader is routinely deprived of information.
Sometimes the examples are sillier. Professor Anna Ahn published a paper recently, showing that people with shorter heels have larger calves. For the Telegraph this became ‘Why stilettos are the secret to shapely legs’, for the Mail ‘Stilettos give women shapelier legs than flats’, for the Express ‘Stilettos tone up your legs’.
But anybody who read even the press release would immediately see that this study had nothing to do with shoes. It wasn’t about shoe-heel height: it looked at anatomical heel length, the distance from the back of your ankle joint to the insertion of the Achilles tendon. The participants were all barefoot, and the paper was just a nerdy insight into the engineering of a human body: if you have a shorter lever at the back of your foot, you need a bigger muscle in your calf. Once again, this story was a concoction by journalists. But more than that, no sane journalist could possibly have risked writing the story about stilettos, if there was a culture and tradition of linking to the academic paper, or even the press release: they’d have looked like idiots, and fantasists, to anyone who bothered to click.
Lastly, on Wednesday the Daily Mail ran with the scare headline ‘Swimming too Often in Chlorinated Water “Could Increase Risk of Developing Bladder Cancer”, Say Scientists’. There’s hardly any point documenting the errors in Daily Mail health stories any more, but if you read the original paper, or even the press release, again, anyone can see that bladder cancer wasn’t measured, and the Mail’s story was a simple distortion. It’s worth mentioning that these press releases were fairly readable pieces of popular science in themselves.
Of course, this is a problem that occurs well beyond science. Over and again, you read comment pieces that purport to be responding to an earlier piece, but distort the earlier arguments, or miss out the most important ones: they count on it being inconvenient for you to check. It’s also an interesting difference between different forms of media: most bloggers have no institutional credibility, so they must build it, by linking transparently, and allowing you to easily double-check their work.
But more than anything, because linking sources is such an easy thing to do, and the motivations for avoiding links are so dubious, I’ve detected myself using a new rule of thumb: if people don’t link to primary sources, I don’t trust them, and I don’t read them.