From Wikipedia: “A weasel word, or anonymous authority, is an informal term for words and phrases aimed at creating an impression that something specific and meaningful has been said, when in fact only a vague or ambiguous claim has been communicated.” Media commonly uses weasel words in headlines to create scary scenarios out of relatively low confidence predictions.
Most journalism in the U.S. today is “yellow journalism” that focuses on scandal, celebrity, “crisis”, the oppressed and fear and the prophets of doom – via scary headlines, and sample bias to cover stories that fit the yellow journalism narratives. Today, the most over used word in media is “crisis” – as you’ll see in this post, today, everything is a “crisis”.
It’s time again for the annual “World’s Happiest Country” bull shit survey results. Using a survey that doesn’t measure happiness, the survey proclaims – every year – the same Nordic countries as the world’s happiest. That’s because the metrics they use define happiness as living in a Nordic country! But again, don’t measure anyone’s happiness. And every year, the media twits fall for this survey.
The media loves the term “bomb cyclone”, a technical term from meteorology that sounds super scary. Most of the public has no idea what it means, and even with the official definition, it still is mostly meaningless to the public. But it sounds scary. And that’s the main point.
Half of recent news reports about holiday suicides spread disinformation that suicides go up over the holidays: Summary: Despite media claims that suicide rates increase dramatically over the holiday period, researchers report the average daily suicide rate during the holidays remain among the lowest rate of any period of the year. Source: University of Pennsylvania The holiday-suicide myth, the false claim that the suicide rate rises during the year-end holiday season, persisted in some news coverage through the 2021-22 holidays, according to…
Two years ago, we were told by multiple “sides” that misinformation and disinformation on social media threw election results. Two years later, oddly, everyone is pretending the same misinformation and disinformation no longer is an issue – which is not very believable. And then spin: “The amount of content we saw that you could call kind of election disinformation was actually larger than what we saw in 2020 — but overall, the effects were much more muted,” Source: Why misinformation…
A reporter named David Axe writes the same, scary, fear-inducing “worst Covid variant yet” headline story nearly every month the past year. He’s been wrong every time. But his editors don’t seem to mind.
This Axios news report makes the classic reporter error – providing percentage increases without every providing a starting value. Does a scary +100% mean something increased from 1 to 2? We have no way of knowing.
91% of US news about Covid topics was negative – even when reporting on positive vaccine developments or low case counts in schools. The media learned that consumers demand negativity – I postulate this is because consumers who are suffering from hysteria and anxiety seek out news that confirms their anxiety, and that being anxious is okay.
Two appalling bad studies were widely shared by “experts” on social media. One was so bad, and its errors so obvious, that they only way they could have decided to share was to do so without having read even the abstract of the study.