How mammoth cloning became fake news
Feb. 23rd, 2017 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2lwaOry:How mammoth cloning became fake news:
mindblowingscience:
According to the Guardian, New Scientist, and many other press outlets, the Harvard geneticist George Church announced last week that he is going to produce elephant embryos with woolly mammoth genes within two years.
Media outlets this week have run more than 60 stories about Church’s press announcement, with breathless headlines, like “Woolly mammoths ‘to walk the earth again in TWO YEARS’ after massive breakthrough”, or “Woolly Mammoth Could Be ‘De-Extinct’ In 2 Years, Scientist Says”.
Now Church is a smart biologist. He knows that neither he nor anybody else is going to make a live woolly mammoth in two years. His interviews with the press, like the one reported by New Scientist, seem to have included lots of caveats admitting that the whole project falls short of “Jurassic World”-level science. Most media outlets ignored those caveats, and ran with clickbait headlines anyway.
Is this just another case of the media sensationalizing what is otherwise a good science story? Five reasons convince me that this week’s mammoth cloning story is beyond sensationalism, it is fake news. Looking at how this story went wrong says some depressing things about the state of today’s media coverage of science.
Continue Reading.
i still have one of the fake news stories open in a tab because Woolly Mammoths Are My Lifelong Hyperfixation and I couldn’t actually bring myself to read it, so I guess I’m sort of relieved I didn’t make myself read it. Still though.
:(
mindblowingscience:
According to the Guardian, New Scientist, and many other press outlets, the Harvard geneticist George Church announced last week that he is going to produce elephant embryos with woolly mammoth genes within two years.
Media outlets this week have run more than 60 stories about Church’s press announcement, with breathless headlines, like “Woolly mammoths ‘to walk the earth again in TWO YEARS’ after massive breakthrough”, or “Woolly Mammoth Could Be ‘De-Extinct’ In 2 Years, Scientist Says”.
Now Church is a smart biologist. He knows that neither he nor anybody else is going to make a live woolly mammoth in two years. His interviews with the press, like the one reported by New Scientist, seem to have included lots of caveats admitting that the whole project falls short of “Jurassic World”-level science. Most media outlets ignored those caveats, and ran with clickbait headlines anyway.
Is this just another case of the media sensationalizing what is otherwise a good science story? Five reasons convince me that this week’s mammoth cloning story is beyond sensationalism, it is fake news. Looking at how this story went wrong says some depressing things about the state of today’s media coverage of science.
Continue Reading.
i still have one of the fake news stories open in a tab because Woolly Mammoths Are My Lifelong Hyperfixation and I couldn’t actually bring myself to read it, so I guess I’m sort of relieved I didn’t make myself read it. Still though.
:(
