In his 1986 classic The Cult of Information, Roszak warned us that information has ‘been divorced from its conventional meaning, [and is] up for grabs… for the information theorist, it does not matter whether we are transmitting a fact, a judgement, a shallow cliché, a deep teaching, a sublime truth, or a nasty obscenity. All are ‘information’.
Though this was in the context of a critique of many of the rhetorically driven ‘information revolution’ theses, the phrase often comes to mind when I’m surfing the web… or, indeed, marking student work. The web (and ‘Googling it’ in particular) seems to be the first port of call for so many research efforts these days. Not a problem per se, but it means that being able to sort a sublime truth from the nasty obscenity becomes a much bigger issue when so much of the information is published without any process of peer review or quality assurance.
Two totally unrelated stories illustrated this well for me recently.
The first was a bit of fun really, but said something important about the nature of the press perhaps. Bored by lack of football news following the end of the season in England, some supporters of my team — Sunderland — decided to make up a transfer rumour. They posted bogus claims on various fan sites that Czech international Jan Koller was in negotiations with Sunderland — and equally bogus claims that the news was on his current (German) club’s web site — and then sat back to see if the media would bite.
Within hours the local paper ran the story on its back page (’Cats want Koller - AMBITIOUS Sunderland want to sign giant Czech striker Jan Koller [...] But enquiries are still at the very early stage for the Borussia Dortmund forward…’). The following day the best selling tabloids picked it up, including The Sun (’Cats eye giant Jan - Sunderland want giant striker Jan Koller to fire them to Premiership safety. The Black Cats are having talks with Borussia Dortmund in a bid to tie up a £1.5 million deal for the 32 year-old Czech.’) and The Mirror (’KOLLER & TIE-UP - SUNDERLAND want giant striker Jan Koller to boost their chances in the Premiership. The Black Cats are in talks with Borussia Dortmund in a bid to tie up a £1.5million deal for the Czech international.’).
All lies, of course, and sourced initially from fan sites with made up quotations being reproduced and false certainties and facts inserted by some very lazy journos, probably on the basis of the local paper story being fed to the PA and embellished to fill out the gaps.
Less than 48 hours after starting the rumour, the global television media were on the case with the player’s agent had to contact Sky Sports News to deny the claims appearing in the press: ‘These stories are a major surprise and I think someone is dreaming up stories’. If only he knew…
The second story concerns more serious subject matter - the nature and extent of climate change - and was uncovered by George Monbiot:
For the past three weeks, a set of figures has been working a hole in my mind. On April 16th, New Scientist published a letter from the famous botanist David Bellamy. Many of the world’s glaciers, he claimed, “are not shrinking but in fact are growing. … 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980.” His letter was instantly taken up by climate change deniers. And it began to worry me. What if Bellamy was right?
Of course, he wasn’t:
So last week I telephoned the World Glacier Monitoring Service and read out Bellamy’s letter. I don’t think the response would have been published in Nature, but it had the scientific virtue of clarity. “This is complete bullshit.” A few hours later, they sent me an email.
“Despite his scientific reputation, he makes all the mistakes that are possible”. He had cited data which was simply false, failed to provide references, completely misunderstood the scientific context and neglected current scientific literature. The latest studies show unequivocally that most of the world’s glaciers are retreating.
So Monbiot e-mailed Bellamy a few times to find out where the figures came from - turns out it was a site called Iceagenow.com. Here the figures were slightly different (55% of the 625 mountain glaciers under observation rather than 555) and were sourced as coming from ’21st Century Science and Technology’, which got them from www.sepp.org, which said they came from a 1989 issue of Science. Monbiot continued his search for the original source:
I went through every edition of Science published in 1989, both manually and electronically. Not only did it contain nothing resembling those figures; throughout that year there was no paper published in this journal about glacial advance or retreat.
So, it wasn’t looking too good for Bellamy, or Singer, or any of the deniers who have cited these figures. But there was still one mystery to clear up. While Bellamy’s source claimed that 55% of 625 glaciers are advancing, Bellamy claimed that 555 of them – or 89% – are advancing. This figure appears to exist nowhere else. But on the standard English keyboard, 5 and % occupy the same key. If you try to hit %, but fail to press shift, you get 555, instead of 55%. This is the only explanation I can produce for his figure. When I challenged him, he admitted that there had been “a glitch of the electronics”.
So, in Bellamy’s poor typing, we have the basis for a whole new front in the war against climate science. The 555 figure is now being cited as definitive evidence that global warming is a “fraud”, a “scam”, a “lie”.
As Mark Twain once said: ‘A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes’. (Or did he? This one could run and run…)
