Tuesday
Apr262011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Churnalism
Here's a fascinating new tool - Churnalism.com. It allows you to enter the text of a press release and find out how much of it was copied and pasted by UK newspapers.
I tried a Friends of the Earth press release about small-scale energy generation and found that around half ended up unaltered in (guess where)...the Guardian.
Or what about a Greenpeace press release about taking the government to court over deep water drilling. Well, roughly three quarters found its way to (a) the Independent (b) The BBC and (c) the Scotsman.
Reader Comments (14)
Just come back from the double bank holiday to catch up with all my work before that bloke marries that bird, I think her names Jordan or sumthing and you give me something like this, I'm going to be here for hours.
Our well my work can wait a little bit longer there's a couple of stories a certain Moonbat has written, i wonder how much of his work is copy and pasted? I will not both with the BBC as the only part that isn't copy and pasted is probably the authours name.
That's quite a handy website.
Just to be clear, though, the date of the press release (as stated by Churnalism) is probably the date when someone entered the text on Churnalism, as opposed to when the press release was actually created. Searching for the text itself on Google will usually bring up the press release with the date.
The reason I mention this is that the FOE press release looks (at least on Churnalism) as if it was created years after the Guardian article. That's somewhat misleading. The press release was actually created prior to the Guardian article, hence the 'churning'.
Junior (Senior?) journalists are idle buggers, who when told to write or fill x column inches on a subject do a quick copy & paste, then shove off to the pub for a liquid lunch?
In the days when my wife wrote press releases she classified journalists into two sorts.
(i) Those who changed the opening line.
(ii) Those who didn't bother.
She preferred the second sort, because the first sort would often have failed to grasp the point and so would accidentally change the meaning.
I think that in the days when most journos were hopeless p*sspots, they turned out much more interesting copy than the tofu and bean-salad nibbling creatures who write about the environment these days.
For one thing, they typically had hangovers, so were always looking for someone to take it out on...
Looks lke Loopy Louise Gray has been taken away from 'green news' stores at the Telegraph. Otherwise you can be sure that any survey of cut n'paste from the ecofascists would have her 'contributions' top of the rankings.
Instead she has been reduced to writing about dodgems at Butlins.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8472394/Butlins-bans-bumping-on-the-bumper-cars.html
This sounds like a good game for sceptics who are light on their feet and keyboards.
Journalist reproduces press release. Very quickly in the comments under the piece, someone points out where it came from. Journalist, one hopes, discredited or at least embarrassed.
Not limited to global warning reports, methinks.
Latimer Adler
Don't worry, Louise is back on the beat with this load of rubbish http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/royal-wedding/8472283/What-is-the-carbon-footprint-of-the-royal-wedding.html .
The problem for many journalists is that they don't have an in-depth understanding of climate-related stories, and lack the time and motivation to correct that deficit.
So, they copy out the press releases rather than originate copy.
Those who create the PRs know this, and that is why many releases are themselves a distortion of the actual science they purport to describe.
The distortion is invariably of the 'worse than we thought' variety. Mainly because this increases the odds of editors running the story, but sometimes because whoever wrote the release is biased.
Sites like Churnalism are going to make lazy journalists a lot easier to spot (if we can be bothered to check). I wonder if over time, it will actually have an effect - eg journos will have to learn the art of the sustained paraphrase.
It reminds me of all those German Eurocrats currently getting caught out for plagiarising (or having someone else plagiarise) their doctoral theses.
You do have to be careful what you filch, in these searchable times.
Umbongo
To which the only rational response is the same as any question about the Royal Wedding:
Who gives a f*ck?
Wow. This is much more significant than it appears at first sight. I have always thought the campaigning AGW movement relied on lazy short-cut journalism to disseminate its propaganda. This service could potentially be the forensic tool of choice to prove it. This is the Internet at its finest.
O/T, but did anyone notice the editor of the Grauniad complaining that someone took out a super-injunction about an article in his newspaper. Perhaps someone should take out a super-injunction against anything published in that "journal" ....
Just to say that 90+% of an article may be a recycled press release but the10% or so which says it's all bollocks is probably the more significant part.
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