Survey-manufactured news
A familiar topic on StatsChat is the use of surveys (of widely varying quality) purely to create a press release, in the hope of getting some free product placement from overworked journalists. The UK blog Ministry of Truth has a detailed look at a company that seems to specialise in this form of marketing
If you didn’t see it on the BBC, then you may well have caught up with the story via the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror or the Yorkshire Evening Post. In a sense, it doesn’t really matter where you saw the story because they were all churned from the same press release, which had been put out by a Gloucester-based PR agency called 10 Yetis, and they all, to varying degrees of cut and paste, uncritially reported at least some of the contents of the press release.
…
It is also, as you may also have already guessed, a complete and utter load of bullshit from start to finish, and that’s really what this particular article is all about.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Just read that entire article; fascinating and disturbing at the same time. Seems like nothing changed after the post though judging by 10yeti’s results page with new press releases in the Daily Mail earlier this month.
12 years ago