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That’s it. I’ve had enough. BBC – consider yourself warned – every deliberate statistical error which oozes its way onto your website will become a matter of record.

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The Crime
Firstly, a justification. Most of the mainstream media today suffer from a terrible affliction. It would appear that a large proportion of journalists have a large abscess in their bodies – sometimes over 100 cubic-centimeters. And to make matters worse, it would appear to be in exactly the same place where their brains should be.

How else can we explain the shockingly moronic reporting of science and statistics in the news today?

The only other explanation is that they’re somehow deliberately misinterpreting facts and presenting them in such a manner as to evoke the most acute response possible from their readership. But they wouldn’t do that, would they? Deliberately mislead and deceive their beloved readers and viewers? No?

Of course they bloody would.

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The Accused
But they shouldn’t. And we all know this. However, while the PCC remains Rupert Murdoch’s well-trained and obedient dog – instead of the fearsome, powerful rottweiler the public deserve to have defending them – there’s nothing we can do about that.

But don’t worry. It shouldn’t matter.

There is, after all, an independent media body in the UK. A wonderful beacon – envied the world over. They don’t work for profit. Their only mandate is to serve the British public. They’re different.

I’m talking, of course, about the BBC – but I’d forgive you for not realising, since none of that is actually what they do.

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The Charges
The BBC, despite its mandate, has become all-too complacent about bending facts and dancing to whatever tune the more sensationalist media start farting from its metaphorical bagpipes. The Beeb have, for all intents and purposes, abandoned the public interest they are supposed to serve – and for no greater reason than “Well everyone else is doing it. We have to compete.”

Sorry BBC, but that’s not enough for me.

I dutifully pay my license-fee every year – like oh-so-many others – and we demand a news service interested in facts, accuracy, balance and public-interest. Note, BBC, that we make the distinction between public-interest and what-the-public-happen-to-currently-be-interested-in-because-Simon-Cowell-is-bloody-good-at-advertising.

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The Evidence
So, as of this moment – every statistical error on the BBC, every bit of science that gets a misleading headline splatted upon it, every sensationalised report – everything will be logged. The nature of the crime will be recorded and, given time, I’ll probably amass a large volume of data of my own – and a few creative uses to which I will accurately put it.

BBC – You have been warned.

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So let us begin…

Exibit A
Today’s offering comes from the piece entitled – ‘Long-term harm’ of too much TV for toddlers.

(The mini-headline for this piece – appearing on the most-read or most-shared section – is ‘Long-term harm’ of Toddlers’ TV, which is even more vague and misleading – and could even suggest that the content aimed at young children is causing some sort of physical affliction.)

Spot the BBC’s signature-move of taking a section of quote out of context. You don’t even need to hunt for the whole of the quote – because if the whole of the quote agreed with the headline, there would be no need to only use half of it. The quote itself doesn’t appear in the article, so it’s impossible to check.

Note: there are no regulatory guidelines governing the contents of headlines. The BBC could run a story about a sick sheep in Cumbria under the headline ‘Gordon Brown rapes Pope’ and the BBC Trust – useless though it is already – would have no legislative powers to stop it.

The gist of the article is that toddlers who watch too much television are thereby doomed to fail in school. The article – as with many before it and, no doubt, many more to come – implies a direct link between television and education standards.

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What did they do Wrong?
In “statistical language” this is a implied to be a causation or “causal-link” – the first thing causes the second – in fact, the study reports only a “correlation” – both things (television watched and academic performance) follow the same pattern. The difference may – at first – seem irrelevant, but when we look deeper, we see that it isn’t.

And that’s why it’s so important for the BBC – and all media – to get these things right.

While the article implies Television causes poor performance, it is much more likely that both a large volume of TV-time; and poor educational performance, are both caused by a third, unreported factor?

In this case – can we perceive how a poor parent would (1) dump their child in front of the television for long periods and (2) do little to motivate their child to learn? Of course we can. The third factor is bad parenting.

And so the story becomes  – Bad Parents Sit their Kids in Front of the TV all Day, Feed them Junk Food and Don’t Help them in School.

Well shock-fucking-horror, BBC. What insight. What depth. What a new and original way of stating-the-bleeding-obvious.

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The Moral of the Story
So the real lesson of the study is – be better parents and don’t use the television as a baby-sitter. The lesson is not – television = stupid. Poor parents who read this article could just find another inanimate object to become their child’s surrogate and the problem remains unsolved.

Does the BBC report this? It does not.

It plays-up this imagined causal link between television and intelligence (throwing in obesity for good measure) as if televisions all contain invisible imps who, armed with their vast array of invisible tools, perform incremental lobotomies on their unknowing victims – the viewers – while pumping glycerin into their skin through a magic portal in the human belly-button.

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If you read any BBC article guilty of distorting facts or misusing statistics, please let me know so it can take its rightful place in this catalogue. Drop me an email at andrew@andrewjamescarter.com or leave a comment below.

Oh, and apologies for the Fox-News-esque title of “Stat-Watch”. It seems I’ve already expended my creative-juices for the day.

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