And on that cheery note, here! Have a neat new (year-old, not today on CNN) explanation for the gravity hole in our ocean, on this beautiful wreck of a potato-planet we call home.
#Science
#TakeMeGravityHole!
#MediaLiteracy (just because it's been reported on legacy media doesn't mean it's automatically a breaking science or tech story; check the source!)
New Scientist (Paywall cracked)
https://archive.ph/w0sJV
@MLClark I remember the last forty times this news "broke".
We're so desperate sometimes to believe that we're still ultimately making strides in understanding, and having wonderful revelations about the world to offset all the horror in it, that we'll go back to the same old well as often as we need to, eh?
@MLClark I think it's more that the editorial directives given for filler material are at work here. The people writing these articles are likely just given a subject and word-count, and may never have even had an interest in the subject.
And of course, as puff filler, it's no good if you mention that a cursory internet search shows the same info going back 40 years. It has to be fresh.
There's a little of the "filler" business involved, but there's also a credulity in newsrooms around science and tech briefs in general. I've written about this often in relation to medical news (& occasionally physical science news); if there's an academic association in a PR brief, it tends to be taken at face value, and few journalists have the scientific literacy to do as much as a cursory search (as you note) to see if it's actually new, or just part of a funding hype cycle.
Even though I'm not working with a formal organization anymore, I still get mailouts for science news workshops expressly targeting related journalists, to try to improve how they engage with surrounding research. A few times a year they run basic seminars to try to teach journalists scientific and related stats literacy too.
So--the resources are there!
But in practice, so many pubs are just ripping content off one another, so the CNN repeat story will set off the chain again.
I'm sure it's extra fun for someone like you, who's seen us spin in predictable circles like this more times than a merry-go-round on a bright brilliant fair day in June. :)
@MLClark I don't suppose you remember the Ty-D-Bowl man commercials, where the tiny man in a little boat in the toilet would talk about the toilet cleaning product, then the housewife would flush him?
That's kind of how it feels, a bit, actually.
The stuff that spins people around is part of my world, too. I live on Earth!
: )