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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

Essay: Junk news



Junk News

By John William Tuohy


A worldwide news flash, reported by a lazy and gullible media, was actually old news based on junk science. 

Here’s what happened.

In mid-March, the Journal of Forensic Sciences published a paper that stated as fact that the actual identity of London’s famous Jack the Ripper was an insane Polish barber named Aaron Kosminski. The paper's author claimed that new DNA evidence,  blood stains on a silk shawl that may (or may not) have belonged to Catherine Eddowes, one of the Ripper's victims.
The international media ran with the story, stating as an absolute fact that Jack the Ripper’s identity was now known and that the DNA evidence used was new. However, the research wasn’t new and appears to be scientifically inaccurate. The DNA-Aaron Kosminski as the Ripper story has been around since at least 2014.
The science is so bad that a geneticist at the University of Leicester, whose team did the genome sequencing of Richard III, called the new paper "unpublishable" on Twitter, asking, "How did this ever get past peer review?"
The sketchy research work was done by Jari Louhelainen of Liverpool John Moores
University and David Miller of the University of Leeds. The two based their claims on DNA taken from a shawl that supposedly belonged to the before mentioned Catherine Eddowes. A writer named Russell Edwards bought the shawl at auction in 2007 and allowed Louhelainen and Moores to run a DNA analysis on it.
Louhelainen has stated that the DNA on the shawl evidence would never stand up
in court. One of the reasons it would get tossed out of court is that DNA is
passed from a mother to her children, which would link Eddowes with her maternal
descendants but not for the descendants of Kosminski, which begs the question;
how do we know the DNA found the garment belonged to him?
Among other things, there is no conclusive proof that the shawl ever belonged to the victim (Catherine Eddowes) and even if she did own it, there is no evidence….at all….that she was wearing it on the night she was murdered. As for the blood spatter and semen found on the shawl, Louhelainen and Moores can only "hypothesize" (a fancy word for wild ass guess) that the stains are related to the victim and the killer. Adding to the dubiousness of the findings is the fact that the shawl has been handled extensively over decades without any precautions to avoid contamination.
So how did this non-story became a headline? It became headline news because lazy journalists didn’t bother to check the sources and the validity of the story. But the larger question is; Why? Why did the story make the news? Because the monster of around-the-clock, seven days a week, relentless “news” needs to be fed, that’s why. Junk news doesn’t always infiltrate mainline news, it's often placed there on purpose.
The news monster can make the smallest thing and turn it into a mountain of vast importance, all of it for the end results of exploiting and antagonizing us and our emotions. They do it because TV news editors are faced with infinite space to fill and there’s a lot of money, hundreds of millions of dollars actually, in filling that space.
One of the results of around the clock news is that we have A LOT more “news” now than we have ever had before and as a by-product of that, we have a lot more Jack-the Ripper-DNA-non-stories-tossed out at us. In other words, we are now being inundated with junk news…the purposely misleading, the unimportant and refried served as new and important news…..and it shows no signs of going away.
One of the many reasons junk news isn’t going away is because we keep feeding the fire of junk news by reading and watching it. We, all of us, are the reason junk news exists. I’m not talking about the junk news that makes the airwaves that is erroneous, like the Jack the Ripper-DNA thing. I’m talking about air-head news. The useless fluff pushed by the media on their prospective news centers to keep readership high. We read it, we love it and we demand more of the same.
Then we have news alerts on our and alerts for texts. Almost everyone is wired into some sort of social media and Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all push their own form of Junk news and when mainline journalism flies some junk news up the flag pole, social media is more than happy to spread it on their platforms. They get the junk news third hand, for free, they know it will attract readers and they publish it.
So why is junk news an issue? Because it takes away from the quality of our lives, it steals precious moments from us. Moments, investments of our limited life span, that we can’t get back. Junk news, even seconds of it, takes away time better spent in a hundred different ways.
How do we stop the growth of junk news? There isn’t a lot we can do about that except not to get our news from one source. Verifying stories would stop a lot of junk news dead in its path, so would teaching journalist a thing or two about ethical standards but those two things won’t happen because of the bottom line. Dinosaur media….newspapers…can’t afford to verify a story beyond a phone call to what they guess might be the source. Online reporting, although it’s very profitable when it succeeds isn’t going to do a damn thing that will turn away click to their sites and the new TV around the clock media generally lacks the professionalism and the standards to kill a junk news story. Money is money after all.