Junk Post Reporters & Editors Repeat Junk Science.......

This Blog has nothing to do with the Posts' reporting about Israel, but it is useful to show how spectacularly bad their reporters and editors are across a range of topics.

Post lifts press release statistics as fact..but the press release was wrong.

Want to bet they won't correct their mistake....

The critic of an article about a recent study that linked soda consumption to a much higher risk of obesity has the goods.....

Todd Zywicki, September 3, 2004 at 11:26am]

......So the 83 percent figure is really an irrelevant number--nonetheless, the Washington Post reported on page 1, in the second paragraph of the article, that those who drank more than one serving a day "had more than an 80 percent increased risk of developing Type 2 diabetes" than those who had less than one a month. Then a few days later the Post stated in an editorial, "those who had one or more drinks containing sugar or corn syrup per day were 83 percent more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than those who drank less than one such drink per month."

But, the reader might object, the researchers cannot be responsible for how the Washington Post characterizes their research. Well, it turns out that the Post story was lifted directly from the press release from the Harvard School of Public Health, which states in paragraph 2, "Those who reported drinking sugar-sweetened sodas more than once per day showed an increased risk for type 2 diabetes of more than 80 percent compared to women in the study who drank less than one per month...." the 32 percent figure, by contrast, appears nowhere in the press release.