DeafTurbineGate 3: IPSO non-facto
Regulator's ruling on Telegraph 'accuracy' harms press as well as public
By Richard Black
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By Richard Black, ECIU Director
The next time you see an article in a newspaper claiming that X thing happened ‘according to’ Y source, be aware that the link between X and Y may not actually exist.
You may be reading make-believe; and that’s just fine by the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), the new body set up in the wake of the Leveson Inquiry to rebuild public trust in print journalism by ensuring that papers follow a code of ethics and standards.
Let me retrace my steps.
In October, the Daily Telegraph carried an article in both online and print editions that opened with the warning that ‘Living close to wind farms may lead to severe hearing damage or even deafness, according to new research…’
The Mail wrote a very similar story, while the Express and Times wrote short snippets.
As I detailed shortly afterwards, the new research showed no such thing.
Performed by a team at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and published in the Royal Society’s journal Open Science, the research didn’t use actual wind turbines, or even recordings of the noises they make.
Rather, the scientists played to a small group of laboratory volunteers sounds that are broadly of similar low frequencies to the noise that wind turbines can produce, but at much louder levels.
Furthermore, they did not observe ‘severe hearing damage or deafness’. Instead they found that exposure to the intense low frequencies affected otoacoustic emissions – very faint sounds that the inner ear makes – raising a concern that prolonged exposure might damage hearing.
So what we really have is research showing that if wind turbines were much louder than they actually are, and if the sounds they produce are close enough to the experimental sounds to be confident that the results of the research would apply (which we don’t know), and if the variations in otoacoustic emissions do presage a hearing impairment from prolonged exposure (which we also don’t know), then living near wind turbines might, just possibly, lead to some kind of hearing impairment.
Not quite as sexy, is it?
‘Not a sham’
When IPSO launched last September, its head, Sir Alan Moses, said he could understand why critics considered the new regulator a ‘sham’, but would prove them wrong.
The organisation was set up to replace the discredited Press Complaints Commission.
And all subjects come under its remit – in particular as regards Clause One of the Editors’ Code, which states: ‘The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information’.
Clause One goes on to say that the press ‘must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact’, and that inaccuracies should be corrected publicly.
At ECIU, set up to support evidence-based communication on energy and climate change and launched shortly before IPSO came into being, we decided that we needed to test IPSO’s willingness to be more than a ‘sham’, to use Sir Alan’s word.
Clearly the research cited in the ‘wind turbines could make you deaf’ story did not show that wind turbines could make you deaf. The professor in question, Dr Markus Drexl, has said so on a number of occasions; and in response to our complaint, the Mail, to its credit, agreed it had got the story wrong and completely re-wrote it.
But the Telegraph stuck by its article. So this seemed to be a good test case for us to put before IPSO.
After quite a bit of back and forth, IPSO has just published its ruling. And in IPSO-world, the Telegraph story was accurate.
Honoured in the breach
You can read the full ruling here but it’s worth pulling out a few gems for what they tell us about how IPSO regards accuracy in journalism.
In paragraph 4, IPSO accepted the newspaper’s claims about its article – specifically that when the journalist wrote ‘Living close to wind farms may lead to severe hearing damage or even deafness’, she was not claiming ‘as fact that wind turbines can cause deafness’.
I’m not sure whether you can get a cigarette paper between the two statements, but I can’t.
It continues: ‘The newspaper denied that the article had claimed as fact that wind turbines can cause deafness. Rather, it made a conjectural link between the findings of the research to (sic) the possible consequences of long-term exposure to noise from turbines.’
We pointed out that the purported link between cause and effect in the article was made using the phrase ‘according to’. We highlighted the Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘according to’, namely ‘as stated or formulated by’, and pointed out that this is clearly an explicit attribution, not a ‘conjectural link’.
But IPSO says it’s fine; the Telegraph ‘…did not demonstrate a failure to take care over the accuracy of the article, and the article was not significantly misleading’.
So that’s alright then.
It’s worth pointing out that the Editor’s Code expressly precludes weasel wordplay excuses. ‘It is essential that an agreed code be honoured not only to the letter but in the full spirit’, it says.
Bearing in mind Sir Alan Moses’ fine words at IPSO’s launch, and the events that led to IPSO’s formation, it’s worth also dipping back into the Leveson Inquiry and asking what that noble Lord expected of a new regulator.
The body of evidence submitted to the Inquiry, he said, …‘emphasises the need for balanced and responsible reporting on matters of public interest and, in particular, reporting that reflects the balance of scientific and/or medical opinion on any specific issue. This need arises because the press is regarded as a reliable and responsible source of information…’
And this is particularly true, he says, in ‘science and health reporting, where most non-specialist readers cannot easily judge for themselves what experts are telling us’.
The press has a duty to observe standards higher than pertain in ordinary conversations, he says, referring back to the MMR vaccine controversy, British science journalism’s darkest hour: ‘There is a great deal of difference between “a bloke down the pub” claiming, to his fellow drinkers, that the MMR vaccine causes autism, and a broadsheet newspaper doing the same thing. Media institutions can shape public opinion, they can entrench, or change, public opinion in a way that individual speakers cannot.’
Damaging press
In my view, IPSO’s ruling is not only plain wrong, especially when you bear in mind that its own code acknowledges the need to reflect the spirit rather than just the letter; it’s also damaging to journalism.
If the regulator doesn’t believe that the phrase ‘according to’ implies any kind of evidential weight – if it’s ok for the public to think that when they read that phrase, the newspaper may have absolutely no weight of evidence behind it, just conjecture – how many stories are printed that we won’t believe?
A quick Google News check at the time of writing showed that – as you’d expect – the phrase is everywhere:
EU military chiefs are preparing to fight ISIS over Mediterranean migrants, according to secret documents.
Freezing toads is the most humane way to kill them, according to science.
A war between China and the US is ‘inevitable’, according to state-run news (the kind of story you’d want the paper to get right).
A care home in Retford requires improvement, according to a report.
Being a superstar is not that hard, according to Taylor Swift.
In reality, the secret documents might say that EU bosses called ISIS a rude word; the toad conclusion could come from research on a wombat; and Taylor might have said 'Like, whatever'. The headlines would still qualify as 'accurate', according to the body responsible for standards in journalism.
As I noted in my initial blog on DeafTurbineGate, in the public mind, the press is a long way from being regarded as (in Lord Leveson's phrase) ‘a reliable and responsible source of information’.
When it comes to climate change, for example, red-top, mid-market and up-market print journalists all rank ahead of oil companies – but behind Labour and LibDem politicians and the European Union, and a vast distance behind environmental campaigners, scientists, the United Nations and the BBC.
That’s according to a recent survey – and it’s not conjecture.
IPSO has a duty to protect the press as well as the public - that's what upholding standards of accuracy and the Editors' Code is all about.
In this case, ruling against the Telegraph would have done a little good for both constituencies. As it is, IPSO has harmed both – and Sir Alan is going to have to work a lot harder if he’s serious about demonstrating that in the realm of science, IPSO intends to be anything more than a sham.
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