Major UK Newspapers Scam Public in Drugs Deception Scandal

Next time you pay good money for a newspaper that promises a sensational story, be careful you're not being ripped off. In fact, you'd be better off if you bought a comic; then you'd know for sure it was a piece of fiction.

Newspaper-selling clichés recently used to bait customers:

In The Times:

Cocaine floods the playground
Use of the addictive drug by children doubles in a year.

In The Telegraph:

Pupils' use of cocaine doubles
One in five secondary pupils takes illegal drugs and the use of cocaine among schoolchildren has doubled in a year, one of the biggest Government surveys of its kind said yesterday.

In The Daily Mirror:

Cocaine for kids doubles
Cocaine use among children has doubled over the past year, according to Government figures.

The manipulation of the figures, by which these attractive headlines were forged, is exposed on the blog Bad Science.
Yet again, the devil is in the statistics and the over-eager press.

(If you've got the time, and your brain's up for it, there's an interesting discussion running through the comments (119 to date) to the Bad Science article, mainly concerning 'null hypothesis significance testing'. It's an eye-opener on statistical vagaries and confusion.)

Memo: 'Data mining is a dangerous profession'.

Image: www.istockphoto.com.

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Apparently, The Sun and The Guardian also carried the fabricated story: but a search in The Guardian on 'cocaine' does not find theirs online, even though it was headed: 'cocaine use doubles amongst school pupils’.

Maybe they hid it in embarrassment when they printed the Bad Science story verbatim, with its intro line: "'Cocaine floods the playground,' roared the front page of the Times last Friday."

Winston Smith is alive and well and working at The Guardian.