Unthreaded
Mark Hodgson
The BBC news crew's pitiful grasp of geography is all too often on display in the rush to crank out stuff. It's particularly irksome when they pounce on something from say California and big it up as "right here and now" because it fits their editorial policy.
The BBC aren't the only ones who either don't get geography +distance or choose to ignore it for the sake of a few clicks and more...
tomo
Supertroll
You're right of course, but that is exactly my point. A quick look at the headline could easily mislead. Why didn't they say "river in Yukon" or "river in Yukon Territory" instead? The headline would still have been fairly short and pithy.
They had a headline on the other day about the murderer in Cleveland, Ohio who posted about his activities on Facebook. In the London-centric BBC where they would get a nose bleed going north of Manchester, they are probably unaware of the existence of Cleveland in north east England. But many of them will no doubt have visited Cleveland, Ohio. So the headline on the BBC website simply referring to the murder in Cleveland confused the hell out of me, and I was 2/3 of the way down the story before I worked out that it was a story about Ohio, not Middlesbrough.
On balance, I'm prepared to put it down to incompetence, but that's not an ideal excuse either!
Mark Hodgson
Mark. I'm surprised you, who must be used to reading small print, confuse Yukon river for Yukon River.
Supertroll
Regardless of what one thinks of Infowars - their discoveries about how Clinton crony Eric Schmidt's Google is setting about doing them down should concern us all.
The rot set in a few years ago and I wonder if it's accelerating? - or is it simply that as people loose trust they are x-referencing more? - or a bit of both?
tomo
Ah Tim Harfords piece is based on his earlier FT piece
https://www.ft.com/content/eef2e2f8-0383-11e7-ace0-1ce02ef0def9
Interesting it doesn't mention Lew or debunking but does mention backfire effect
stewgreen
@MH Ah I get you that misleading clickbait phrase
"Climate change makes Yukon river vanish"
is on the BBC news page ..not in the story itself
I note that Yukon story originates from the Guardian on April 17th
and it phrase it
"Receding glacier causes immense Canadian river to vanish in four days"
So I'm guessing BBC sexed it up
..Checking if something is in the Guardian is the BBC defn of fact checking
Ah once on Twitter Apple News uses the exact phrase "Receding glacier causes immense Canadian river to vanish in four days" to link to the BBC story
stewgreen
oops bad link I missed the last l
isthebbcbiased.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/introspective-post.html
Audio begins at 7 mins in
And immediately Harford does the BBC Left/Right complaints fallacy
When all data says complaints from Left are much rarer
stewgreen
More from the BBC misleading headline department:
"Climate change makes Yukon river vanish". Wow, I thought, the Yukon River is a BIG river - that really is big news. Click on the story (on the science & environment page of the website) and the headline changes to the slightly more accurate "Slims River: Climate change causes "river piracy" in Canada's Yukon".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-39634290
So it's not the Yukon River at all, but a river in Yukon. Sloppy editing or deliberately misleading? Who knows. Either way it doesn't reflect well on their standards.
And again, compare the attention-grabbing headline with the truth contained in the first line of the story:
"A team of scientists say a melting glacier in Canada's Yukon has caused a river to completely change course." So it hasn't vanished, it's changed course. Hmm...
Mark Hodgson
Ah the Lew item is mention on /isthebbcbiased
BBC's rubbish commercial arm BBC Future gave Lew a paragraph here
All : "Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at University of Bristol who studies persistence of misinformation in society
Having a large number of people in a society who are mis-informed and have their own set of facts is absolutely devastating and extremely difficult to cope with.
There are solutions available – using the technology that has given rise to this problem. Turning it upside down by changing the algorithms in Facebook or on Google to nudge people into sharing or consuming news that are slightly outside their normal comfort zone. What is happening now is that the cookies you gather as you browse the web will tell the website what it is you like.
The way to get out of this polarisation is for these algorithms to suggest something that I might not like or agree with but is not so offensive to me that I wouldn’t look at it. That way you can keep people from self-radicalising in these ecological bubbles. That sort of technological solution is one good way forward. I think we have to work on that."
Yeh says the kind of person who blocks you on Twitter/facebook if there is the slightest hint you are not in his tribe
stewgreen
Mark Hodgson & Supertroll
Surely "Yukon river" is just an example of dumbing down news to a headline format, suitable for tweets, facebook etc? The BBC is just as guilty as most, and is therefore just as untrustworthy and unreliable as most.
When it comes to scaremongering about Global Warming, there is a significant pattern involving the BBC deliberately reporting "news" in a misleading, unreliable and untrustworthy manner.
The BBC have a few days to work out who and what they represent, and a further 5 years to accept the consequences.