Journalistic Bombast
Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2022 10:13 am
I really hate it when a personality I like and respect does an ad-read on their show with deceptive and/or inaccurate information.
Josh Scherer of Good Mythical Kitchen and the podcast A Hotdog is a Sandwich has an ad for some water filtration system that begins with, "Hey Nicole! Did you know that most people consume a credit card's weight worth of microplastics EVERY WEEK?"
And I thought to myself immediately that that didn't sound right. So I looked it up. But every single article has that same 5g (about a credit card). It all stems from a single study that made a splash with that headline. After some digging, I found an article that put in into context. The article gave a range for the number of plastic particles that people might eat and also a range for the possible weights for those particles. If you take the high end of both of those, then yes, it's technically possible that SOME people somewhere in the world are eating up to 5g of plastic, but it wouldn't be typical. In fact, the article that started all of this actually gave calculations for a reasonable estimate of the worldwide average, which they put at about 0.7 grams. MUCH more reasonable.
So I get why even someone who does basic fact-checking might decide that this checked out, but it just highlights a huge weak spot in our media reporting, and one that I've lamented before. Even when the original scholarly article gives a reasonable picture, someone has to find a way to stretch the info to make a click-bait headline.
Josh Scherer of Good Mythical Kitchen and the podcast A Hotdog is a Sandwich has an ad for some water filtration system that begins with, "Hey Nicole! Did you know that most people consume a credit card's weight worth of microplastics EVERY WEEK?"
And I thought to myself immediately that that didn't sound right. So I looked it up. But every single article has that same 5g (about a credit card). It all stems from a single study that made a splash with that headline. After some digging, I found an article that put in into context. The article gave a range for the number of plastic particles that people might eat and also a range for the possible weights for those particles. If you take the high end of both of those, then yes, it's technically possible that SOME people somewhere in the world are eating up to 5g of plastic, but it wouldn't be typical. In fact, the article that started all of this actually gave calculations for a reasonable estimate of the worldwide average, which they put at about 0.7 grams. MUCH more reasonable.
So I get why even someone who does basic fact-checking might decide that this checked out, but it just highlights a huge weak spot in our media reporting, and one that I've lamented before. Even when the original scholarly article gives a reasonable picture, someone has to find a way to stretch the info to make a click-bait headline.