Japan quake: "Total, utter, stupid, offensive made-up bollocks in the Daily Mail"
By BEN GOLDACRE - BEN GOLDACRE'S POSTEROUS
Added: Fri, 11 Mar 2011 21:06:18 UTC
At least hundreds are dead, possibly thousands, in a natural disaster of enormous and tragic proportions. Bodies are floating in the water, the cooling equipment on a nuclear reactor has failed.
In the Daily Mail, on their "Science and Technology" pages, they have a news story about some idiot astrologer who has decided this all happened because of a "Supermoon", where the moon is a couple of miles closer to the earth than usual.
No seriously. This is an excellent example of "the caveat in paragraph #19". It's also, frankly, extremely fucking tasteless. Under the circumstances, I think I'm pretty good humoured about the things I write about: journalists making stuff up, printing stupid and obvious lies.
Often it's clear where the bullshit came from, what was driving it, intellectually, or commercially.
But I have no idea what even a half-serious newspaper thinks it can possibly gain, reputationally or commercially, from printing something this stupid, from some dismal fantasist astrologer, about a topic this serious. I am officially surprised by the Daily Mail.
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