"Joe Egginton" wrote in message
...
On 20/07/2013 09:58, Graham P Davis wrote:
On Sat, 20 Jul 2013 09:40:43 +0100
yttiw wrote:

On 2013-07-19 23:06:37 +0000, Adam Lea said:

On 19/07/13 19:57, Jim Cannon wrote:
A month ago we were told 10 rubbish summer seasons were due.

Another one who doesn't understand probabilities.

If I said Miami has a warmer climate than London, would the fact
that one day last week London was hotter than Miami disprove that
statement?

No, but you can guarantee that that fact would be headline "news" in
all the tabloids and repeated every 15 minutes on the tv rolling news
programmes.

Such is life with the ignorant and sensationalist media we now have
in this country.


'We now have'? My first realisation that the media wasn't to be relied
upon came sixty years ago, albeit in a fairly trivial way. Since then,
I've come across numerous times when articles have been inaccurate
through bias or incompetence.

A short story I read some years ago also portrayed the press as being
totally unreliable; I can't remember whether it was by Mark Twain or
Edgar Allan Poe.


I realised the press wasn't gospel, 35 years ago. My last year at
secondary school, two pratts set fire to a settee in the assembly hall,
and some of the corridors were smoke filled. In the local paper, the
following evening, they made out that my school was on fire, and the
teachers and pupils made a lucky escape. It was Mark Twain that said,
"Don't let the truth get in front of a good story".


It is not the fault of the press. The public don't want to hear about the
banal truth. They want a good story. So the press has to give them good
stories or pack up shop.

What scientist have to do is understand this. If they want to get a message
across to the public, they have to wrap it up in an entertaining story. The
BBQ summer was a good story, but it backfired. So feeding the press is
not an easy job :-(

Cheers, Alastair.