[bpsdb] In 2007, new blogger Dr*T of the "Thinking is Dangerous" blog suggested the following rule with regard to tabloid headlines: "Any tabloid heading that starts 'Is this....', 'Could this be...' etc. can be safely answered 'No'." This rule has rapidly become accepted by the skeptical community in Britain - a nation terribly afflicted by the tabloid disease - but is it actually accurate? In this special blog edition, I get my nerd hat on and do actual science to test the theory for the special case of the one-time Nazi-supporting Daily Mail.

Foundation:

Private Eye have given us further insight into the way that the BBC "managed" their coverage of the Large Hadron Collider. It seems that the state of Auntie's science reporting is even worse than the pessimists among us imagined, with CERN employees left bemused by the bizarre requests of BBC representatives.

The BBC has issued many dozens of reports about the faked MMR-Autism link over the last several years, and one of the things that myself and other bloggers have noticed is that they keep providing external links from articles to a group of nutters who call themselves JABS. "JDC325" has made numerous requests to the BBC trying to find out why this is, but has gotten nowhere. So I thought I'd have a go.

Somebody at British I.T. organ "The Register" seems to have it in for climate scientists (as commenters at Deltoid have mentioned). Whether there's a genuine agenda, or whether it's just a cheap attempt to get attention and generate page views is impossible to say, but in recent months a whole swathe of articles on climate change denial have appeared on the site. I'll be posting a rebuttal on the science later, but in this first post I want to concentrate on the writers.

Here are three of the articles - and notice the pattern.