DeafTurbineGate 2: The facts strike back

By Richard Black, ECIU Director

In a week when the ethics found in some corners of British journalism have been squirming under the microscope like a diseased nematode worm, it's pleasing to find that standards of accuracy are alive and well at the Daily Mail.

Back in October, the Mail was one of four British papers to report that living near wind turbines could make people deaf, based on a study from a German university.

The Mail and Telegraph both ran full-length articles, the Express and Times carried short snippets known in the trade as NIBs (News in Brief).

The story was, simply, bunkum. The study, led by Markus Drexl at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, had not involved wind turbines themselves or even noise recorded from wind turbines.

Instead, it involved 21 volunteers sat in a laboratory being fed a diet of infrasound - low frequency sound - at levels considerably higher than are permitted from wind farms, certainly in the UK.

In addition, the study didn't find that the infrasound made people deaf. Rather, it looked at a phenomenon called spontaneous otoacoustic emissions (SMOAs).

These are faint sounds made by the inner ear, which can be picked up by very sensitive microphones in laboratory conditions. After exposure to 90 seconds of infrasound, Dr Drexl reported, the SMOAs fluctuated much more than usual, which could, he suggested, be a precursor to hearing damage.

But 'wind turbines make you deaf'? No.

Prevailing wind

As I wrote at the time, how this sort of journalistic cock-up happens is probably incomprehensible to those outside the trade.

First, in some newsrooms there's a prevailing world view. In the four papers in question here, it's that wind farms are expensive, they don't really work anyway, and the public hates them. (The third of those is measurably untrue - but there you are.)

So there's a predisposition to look for stories that fit into that world view - stories that, if you'll pardon the phrase, blow with the prevailing wind.

Onto that substrate you add (in this case) a press release that tried to relate the laboratory findings to real-world things including wind turbines; the pressure that all journalists are now under to garner web hits for their stories; the reduction in time available for thinking and research; and the 'juniorisation' happening in newsrooms across the country that lowers collective experience and expertise.

Finally you add the pressure to copycat - an editor yelling at you that 'I want that F-ing story that's in the Mail/Times/Telegraph and I want it now', as (s)he sees potential hits disappearing to a rival publication that already has the story live - and you have a recipe for a cock-up cascade.

Good grace

All journalists make mistakes, and they're going to happen more frequently under current working norms than under the somewhat more relaxed conditions that used to prevail.

And when you make a mistake, the only thing you can do, if you want to retain any credibility, is to 'fess up, apologise and make a correction.

Which the Mail, on this story, has now done - and with the greatest of good grace.

Admittedly, the paper didn't respond to our initial complaint. But as soon as we registered it with the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), the relatively new regulator that replaced the discredited Press Complaints Commission, they went back to the website story and effected a complete transformation.

The original began like this:

Wind farms could cause people living nearby to go deaf, a new study claims.

The barely audible low frequency hum emitted by turbines harms ‘the exquisite mechanics of our inner ears’, scientists say.

A study of 21 healthy young men and women who were exposed to such sound, revealed that most experienced changes in cells in the cochlear - a spiral shaped cavity essential for hearing and balance.

...which was obviously problematic in all three paragraphs.

The amended version reads:

Wind turbines and air conditioning units generate sound at frequencies too low for some humans to easily hear.

Now scientists believe that just because we struggle to hear low noises, doesn’t mean they are not having a potentially negative effect on our hearing.

A study found that listening to just 90 seconds of low frequency sound can temporarily change the way people’s inner ears work after the sound ends, which may cause some to question whether wind farms, for example, are having a negative effect on people’s hearing.

...which is hunky-dory. You might quibble grammatically with the split infinitive in the first sentence and the slightly convoluted double negative in the second; but in content terms, it's sound.