British Newspapers make things up shock!

You know you always suspected this, but now you know (from Psychology Today0:

Last week, the Sunday Times published an article with the headline “Blonde women born to be warrior princesses.” The article reported that “Researchers claim that blondes are more likely to display a “warlike” streak because they attract more attention than other women and are used to getting their own way – the so-called “princess effect.”” The Times article quotes the evolutionary psychologist at the University of California – Santa Barbara, Aaron Sell, and his findings are purportedly published in his article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, written with the two Deans of Modern Evolutionary Psychology, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.

Except that....

As it turns out, however, none of this is true, as Sell explains in his angry letter to the Times. He and his coauthors do not mention blondes at all in their paper and they don’t even have hair color in their data. The supplementary analyses that Sell performed after the publication of the paper, as a personal favor to the Times reporter, show the exact opposite of what the Times article claims. After he presumably listened to Sell explain all of this on the phone, the Times reporter nonetheless made up the whole thing, and attributed it to Sell.

I remember reading this and thinking it was total bollocks, and that was from my reading of evolutionary biology and psychology, which is "intelligent layman" at best.

But this is part of the Meedja's problem - by going for the quick hit of lightweight fame (the lure of the link economy is similar in the online world) I think they give away long term trust, and thus value. Little by little it seeps away.

And the problem is, just digitizing this sort of ersatz journalism doesn't help - the Huffington Post and the Onion have the market covered