24th
The Lying Newsreader.
Why the fuck can no-one understand statistics? Especially the news. They can’t understand medical reports either. And they make shit up constantly.
Where’s this anger coming from. Well for one, from a media report about race and crime (a can of worms i’m not gonna open) and the other from an article I saw about Peter Andre. Yes, that’s right Peter Andre himself. You see, Peter Andre was recently rewarded compensation by a large newspaper who had printed a story saying he had cheated on Jordan. Boring tosh about wank celebrities I know, but the interesting thing was that the newspaper admitted it had made the whole fucking thing up! Imagine if I went to the shops tomorrow morning and read a headline that stated I was a sex offender. I could prove I wasn’t, get compensation and a retraction, but I probably wouldn’t shake that tag for a long, long time. It’s things like this which is why I don’t trust the media one bit.
There are other countless examples of complete media bullshit, but prehaps the most well known is the uproar about the MMR jab in the late 90’s / early 2000’s. Basically there was a massive scare that the MMR jab would cause autism in children. The basis of this study was a piece of research done into autistic children, who as pretty much every other child at the time, had had the MMR jab. The symptoms of autism had all started within 6 days of the children being given the MMR. Oh shit! That means MMR causes autism! Errr…. Wait a second! All the children had breathed oxygen as well that week! Quick stop your children breathing oxygen cause that must give children autism too! The study had not looked at a cross section of children who had and had not had the MMR jab and found those that did have the jab had a higher chance of autism (i.e. what scientists call using a control group). They had merely jumped to an impossible conclusion, that one thing affected another. This was all in a paper by Andrew Wakefield in 1998. No-one give a shit. (In fact I feel sorry for Andrew Wakefield because he didn’t even really say that in his paper. He merely noted it as something of interest but drew no correlation to autism and the MMR.) Suddenly in 2001, the papers started reporting it again, and the report gained momentum when Cherie Blair said she would not give her newborn the MMR. All of a sudden no-one fancied giving their children the MMR either. After the whole thing blew up and mothers stopped their children having the MMR, researchers worked quickly to prove there was no real link, which of course, there wasn’t. And everyone went back to having the MMR again, and nobody got autism from it.
I’m not making this up.
What was the point of all this? There wasn’t one. It was a severe case of sensationalising by the media. That’s why I always take every little fucking thing I hear on the news with a huge pinch of salt. Especially the weather. You can’t argue with me about that. They clearly make it up.
