An Extraordinary Tale II

Another story from today’s Observer, but this time fiction is stranger than truth. Fiction, because a couple of weeks ago, The Observer had a front page story claiming that new research showed a surge in autism. That story was simply wrong on all sorts of counts. Today, the paper prints what it calls a "clarification". This is obviously a new definition of the noun, and one that I had not come across previously.

 

Ben Goldacre, over at Bad Science, is equally unimpressed. It’s worth reading his piece to appreciate how far journalistic standards appear to be falling at The Observer. Not good, not good at all.

 

Update: apparently The Observer have now removed the original story from their online archives.