Many mainstream media organisations around the world often work hard at presenting news stories with a scientific bent in a manner that makes them understandable to their respective audiences.
Our Media Glass House researchers recall that in the good old days most major popular newspapers employed a science reporter to translate such complex language into more understandable forms.
Sadly such a position is now extinct within much of the mainstream media world.
Still, some news outlets continue to publish science-based stories that are readable and understandable, yet not so simplified that they could be accused of treating their readers or subscribers like idiots.
Then there’s the UK tabloid The Daily Star which recently tackled the task of covering a big scientific yarn on its front page. (main picture)
Our MGH teams will spare you the details, but basically the story – heavily populated with dumbed-down terminology – drew on previous scientific theories that the planet Uranus is pretty much a big ball of methane and very long-range plans by US space agency NASA to develop a new telescope dubbed the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) to probe the universe looking for planets that might sustain some form of life by analysing the gases present in their atmospheres.
Of course the whole idea is far more complex than that, but those simple facts were all The Daily Star needed to tell its readers that the planned new telescope would be “capable of detecting ETs’ farts” and could “go way beyond Uranus in the hunt for little green men”.
“Eggheads say the [telescope] will be able to tell if oxygen – and the fart gas methane – has passed through or been absorbed by the far-off light waves. If they pick up planets with both signs they say it is almost certain it will contain aliens,” the newspaper told its readers.
Our MGH teams suspected that the eggheads, err.. scientists, most likely said such evidence would suggest planets that may be capable of supporting some form of life, not necessarily human life or indeed human-like aliens.
Indeed our researchers quickly found the website of a respected scientific journal that quoted a scientist involved as saying: “We want to probe the atmospheres of these exoplanets to look for oxygen, methane, water vapour, and other chemicals that could signal the presence of life. We aren’t going to see little green men but rather spectral signatures of these key chemicals, or what we call biosignatures.”
In fact our MGH teams say that Uranus was only mentioned by The Daily Star just so it could make the usual joke about its name, and add in the fact that methane smells like farts.
But let’s not waste any more of our precious time, energy, and bandwidth on such misleading, dishonest, low-rent tabloid rubbish.
Our MGH researchers can only conclude that we in Australia should be thankful that none of our nation’s newspapers would sink as low as to take a very serious topic and dumb it down with so much trivial and highly exaggerated content to reach ridiculous conclusions that insult any reasonable person’s intelligence yet may well find an audience among the gullible or ignorant.
IN OUR NEXT MEDIA GLASS HOUSE:
The Daily Telegraph’s national affairs reporter, James Morrow, reports that a First Nations’ voice to parliament would force all Australians to abandon their current Christian names and adopt heathen Aboriginal names.
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