This is just a snapshot of what comes up on doing a Google news search for "megalith quarries". I haven't tried to reckon how many web sites, newspapers and magazines have picked up on the press release pushed out by Antiquity, UCL and maybe other institutions as well. But there may well be hundreds of them worldwide, just three days after the article was "published online" (although it has been in circulation since last August).
It's actually quite frightening how gullible these media outlets are. Many of them have simply regurgitated the press release as they received it. Others do a bit of tweaking. Others employ a house journalist or a guest writer to re-hash the contents. Others seize the opportunity to do a piece of "extended coverage" which incorporates lots of bits and pieces (including maps and photos) from past articles about Stonehenge. Nobody -- NOBODY -- does any scrutiny, and I would not mind betting that none of these pieces is actually based upon a careful reading of the article itself.
The assumption is that if the article is written by a senior professor and his colleagues, it must be reliable. Furthermore, if it is published by a "reputable" journal like "Antiquity" it must be even more reliable........... but what the media outlets and the journalists clearly do not realise is that THERE HAS BEEN NO CAREFUL SCRUTINY of the manuscript either by the Editor or the referees who might have looked at it. (We know that there has been no scrutiny, because if there had been, the authors would have been forced to acknowledge that their evidence is disputed -- and they would have been forced to deal with the criticisms levelled at the "quarrying evidence" by Dyfed, John and myself and by others.)
So this appalling article, full of unsupported assertions and flights of fancy, is accepted as "the unchallenged truth" by the mainstream media, without any questioning at all. And MPP and his mates, guilty as charged with scientific malpractice, are allowed, yet again, to get away with foisting fake news on the gullible public. Who needs Merlin, aliens and spacecraft when you can have magic stones from Wales and wild tribes from the west bearing gifts?
It would all be hilarious if it were not so serious.........
Somebody asked me not so long ago why I don't defer to these senior academics and offer them more respect. I told them that I only offer respect to those who earn it by accepting, in print, that their ideas are disputed, and by addressing the evidence and the interpretations of those who challenge their assumptions. It's called academic debate.
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PS. A lot of people are reading this article right now -- total reads over a thousand now. Strange that MPP and his friends still fail to have noticed it.....
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286775899_OBSERVATIONS_ON_THE_SUPPOSED_NEOLITHIC_BLUESTONE_QUARRY_AT_CRAIG_RHOSYFELIN_PEMBROKESHIRE
A well known purveyor of Fake News in the 17th Century was bookseller John Trundle. Dragons were a favourite e.g. "A discourse relating to a strange and monstrous serpent". He made quite a good living out of his fake stories.
ReplyDeleteCheck him out via your Search Engines, folks.
Alice Roberts ought to be our guardian and saviour in this respect - in 2012 she was appointed the University of Birmingham's first Professor of Public Engagement in science.
ReplyDeleteA glance through her Wikipedia entry finds this quote from her: "Science is about EVIDENCE, not wishful thinking.
She is now President - Elect of the British Science Association, and starts there in September 2019.
I listened to a couple of interviews that Alice Roberts gave on the radio recently.In both she wanted to stress that she is an Anatomist and not an Archaeologist.I wondered at the time if she was trying to distance herself.
ReplyDeleteI did work in copywriting in London many moons ago and it was quite normal to rehash a press release. If you were not sure about the content you would attribute the source (unlike academia). In those days most of the sources were reliable - these days not.
ReplyDeleteIt really is extraordinary that MPP and colleagues get away with their shaky work year after year. In parallel I hear daily the BBC giving airtime to the same old liars who were telling the same old lies years ago - I don't get this either. UK seems to have lost an ethical dimension without acquiring the skills to live in a society where many lie. In other countries people do not believe what they read in the newspaper, here many do.
It is not only Facebook who should be held accountable for false news. The BBC, the Independent, the Mail, etc should also be in the frame - especially the BBC who were are supposed to rely on for impartial information.
The situation will be self-correcting in that people will become ever more sceptical of what they are told by others.
I wish I could share your optimism, Chris, that things will sort themselves out in spite of the stunts involving the media. Truth will out, of course, but the media are so uncritical and apparently so incapable of intelligent scrutiny of the stuff that they push out that they probably don't even wonder whether something is true or not. So truth will out, but it may take that bit longer -- "if the stuff that we publish is shown to be nonsense, in fifty years' time, who cares? We'll all be dead and gone by then anyway........."
ReplyDeleteThe time pressure on the media is enormous. If an article or press release is deemed to be worthy of coverage, the time limit is effectively three days. So journalists and editors have to get their version of a story out preferably on the same day that the first coverage appears in the competing media, and maybe it's acceptable on the day after that. As a last resort, two days afterwards..... After that, the story is dead. Weird.......
So for time constraints, lack of in-house expertise and a number of other reasons, scrutiny is a luxury they cannot afford.