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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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) [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]