How I was taken in by press distortion
The New Scientist has just published an interesting article by Simon Baron-Cohen about how his latest research into autism got misrepresented in the UK press earlier this year.
Simon points out that whilst the authors of the article, which appeared in The Guardian in the UK, did a reasonable job of reporting the actual facts of the study – how it measured a correlation between testosterone levels in the amniotic fluid of 235 children who do not have autism and various character traits – the article badly misrepresented the results of the study. Simon feels that the editors of the article distorted the facts by attaching misleading and wrong headlines and by using an emotive picture. The article also linked the research to pre-natal testing for autism – something which Baron-Cohen points out wasn’t a part of the research at all.
I remember reading The Guardian article in January, with a sense of sadness and disbelief. If you are not British, it’s worth pointing out that that The Guardian is one of the more serious British broadsheet newspapers, and is generally well respected for the quality of it’s journalism.
The article talks about autism as being “described as a consequence of an extreme male brain”, and upon reading this I associated the words with Baron-Cohen and his study. I consider extreme male behaviour to be something quite different – the behaviour of the alpha male. I have yet to meet a single alpha male with any obvious signs of autistic traits.
I also worried that a test for autistic traits based on levels of testosterone in amniotic fluid would be a very bad thing. I live with Aspergers, and I wouldn’t feel at all comfortable with foetuses being aborted simply because they might grow up to have autistic traits – the sort of traits that make my life different from the norm , but certainly don’t make it a life that isn’t worth living.
I was left with a profound feeling that Baron-Cohen and his team were barking up the wrong tree, and doing the field of autistic research a great disservice.
Of course, upon reading the New Scientist article, I can now see that my distaste at Simon and his team’s work was actually due to bad reporting, and did not accurately reflect the work that the team had produced.
Simon wrote to the Guardian and they published a response from him that set the record straight. As is often the case, I didn’t see this response – only the misleading article. This really backs up what Simon says in the New Scientist article, that the media has a great power to do harm, and that perhaps it should be subject to some form of pre-publication regulation.
I can’t see this happening – it just wouldn’t work in a world of real-time news.
I do, however, go away with far more respect for Simon Baron-Cohen and his team, and far less for The Guardian.
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