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.
