Archives of Bad Journalism

Spam Journalism: The spurious use of sensational headlines to add spice to an otherwise pointless article.
It was inevitable that the sentinel event report , designed to help hospitals improve systems, would be seized upon by journalists to score some easy sensational headlines. The Dom Post supplies us with this fine headline:
Hospitals to blame in 92 deaths
Hospital [...]

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Spam Journalism: The spurious use of sensational headlines to add spice to an otherwise pointless article.
This is what happens when legitimate studies are reported sensationally:
Bad doctors most likely to be men, report shows
Women make safer doctors than men, Britain’s largest study of medical performance has found.
They are less likely to be investigated over concerns about [...]

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I have been following the DML/Labtests saga with interest. The media now seem to be fixated on the blood collection waiting times as if this is something other than a minor inconvenience. The DHBs have performance targets in place for waiting times and I’m certain that Labtests, once they have ironed out their initial, inevitable [...]

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I sometimes find it heard to understanding where Deborah Coddington is coming from. She seems to live in a special little world of journalism , often writing about the vagaries of journalism itself from her unique point of view. And I mean unique.
Today she is complaining that Judith Collins has presented a (by all accounts, well-researched) article [...]

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It’s the story that won’t die – or, rather, won’t be allowed to die. For the fourth week in a row the Herald has run the non-story of Paula Bennett’s Daughter’s Partner’s gang-connections. Sorry, I almost broke out laughing as I was typing that. There is a scene in the Mel Brook’s sci-fi send up [...]

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Yet another article in the continuing non-saga of Paula Bennett’s criminal non-connections. This time it has strayed from the evil tabloid twin and infected Granny Herald herself.
This is a non-story that is an unwarranted invasion of Paula Bennett’s personal life.
There is no evidence of a security issue.
There is no evidence of ministerial or parliamentary abuse [...]

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The prize for the most worthless article of the week will probably go to the Dominion Post for the gem “$18m state housing bill for new Govt tenants“. It was a shoo-in from the opening paragraph:
They have got the chauffeur-driven limos, and now a select group of ministers is settling into some of New Zealand’s [...]

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