Lack of scientific literacy, or lazy churnalism?

(the links in this post were time-sensitive; see postscript below)

Here's some hot science news. Contrary to what you were taught at school, sodium hydroxide, aka caustic soda, is an "acid" - at least according to several media outlets. The Press Association has issued a newswire about an accident in which a boy was badly burned after falling through a building roof into a vat of caustic soda. Their newswire, however, had the erroneous headline "Boy, nine, falls into vat of acid".

How many media outlets spotted and corrected the basic, GCSE-level error that caustic soda is strongly alkaline, rather than an acid?

Most local paper webpages, perhaps unsurprisingly, automatically ran the newswire, e.g. Wrexham Chronicle; googling the headline phrase "boy nine falls into vat of acid" shows hundreds more.

Among national dailies, the Daily Express and Daily Star did the same. So did free-sheet Metro.

Almost before you could blink, it was being reported in Turkey.

Sky News sub/webeditors gave it their own erroneous headline (clearly feeling the need to work the word "horror" in there).

Even Channel 4 News carried the erroneous headline on its website, which is perhaps embarassing given that their website proudly proclaims a feature called "FactCheck".

The BBC got it wrong too, in the headline and text of this coverage.

ITN didn't mention acid in the headline or text of its coverage, but tagged the story 'vat of acid' and 'sodium hydroxide'.

These examples illustrate how no-one in news organisations appears to be employed to check the accuracy of information as they propogate it on their sites. And they show that just because a media outlet has a good science correspondent (scientist-turned-journalist and ex-Nature staffer Tom Clarke at Channel 4 News certainly knows that caustic soda is alkaline!) there is no guarantee of accurate science content unless that correspondent happens to be covering that particular story.

(But credit where credit is due for once: the Daily Mail actually states that caustic soda is alkaline in its coverage).

Now you may feel this is just pedantry (after all, does it really matter to the poor boy involved?). But let's imagine a newswire with the headline "Man dies watching performance of Chaucer's Richard III". I wonder how many outlets would cut-and-paste it, without correcting the error in the authorship of the play? Is the problem here scientific literacy, or the pandemic of "churnalism"?

And if such a basic error of scientific fact can become widespread so easily, what about errors in the reporting of more complex topics? Arguably it shows that there is all the more reason for scientists to engage wider audiences about their work, whether by learning how to interact effectively with the media, or by making the most of opportunities to communicate directly with the public. Of course, this Connecting Science social network was created to provide support and share resources for scientists to do that.

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POSTSCRIPT: Channel 4 News have now corrected their coverage, after doubtless several folk including me dropped them a note in the interests of scientific literacy. And now the Press Association have also corrected the newswire, which appears to be automatically corrected on several outlets that carried it. This shows that many news outlets automatically aggregate from sources, so it's no wonder that churnalism is a problem (or, alternatively, an opportunity for those producing good press releases...). But you can still can watch the redirection of URLs in the links above to see the original headlines, while the Daily Express and Daily Star picture captions still talk about a "vat of acid". And as of 1100h today, the linked BBC and Sky articles are still uncorrected.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: The linked BBC article has now also been corrected. But Sky's headline still stands, though several readers' comments point out the error.

PPPS: Sky have now put quotes around the word acid in the headline on their own site. This is apparently fine because one of the witnesses used the word to describe what the boy fell into. So that's ok then: taking someone else's word for it and putting it in quotes clearly beats actually researching a story (which reminds me of what happens when you put a newspaper editor in charge of government communications strategy...).