News media is a web of lies – about spiders
- If the international mainstream media cannot report objectively and accurately on spiders and their often unfortunate interactions with humans, as a new study finds, what hope is there for fair reporting on any other subjects?
The mainstream news media is biased. Its reporters are only interested in telling their side – the right side – of the story, not both sides. Either they want to promote a hidden agenda or they want to hype stories for sensationalism. One or the other, accuracy and objectivity are out the window.
And that’s especially the case when it comes to reporting on spiders. The findings come from a new study, titled “The global spread of misinformation on spiders” and published in the latest edition of Current Biology. Initially, I thought someone was pulling my leg. But no, it’s a very legitimate study. So, yes, mainstream journalists are “arachnologically” biased. Sorry, I am not sure that’s a proper adverb, but arachnology – I just learned for this column – is the scientific study of arachnids, which comprise spiders and related invertebrates such as scorpions.
Led by Stefano Mammola of the Finnish Museum of Natural History at the University of Helsinki, an international team of researchers found that worldwide, 47 per cent of news articles contained errors and 43 per cent were sensationalist.
The articles were taken from a global database of online newspaper articles on spider-human interactions such as biting incidents that were published from 2010 to 2020 and covered 41 languages and 81 countries.
What motivated the study? Those poor eight-legged arthropods just keep getting bad press. The researchers wrote: “Spiders are widely feared animals, and thus an ideal model system to study misinformation spread.
“The successful dissemination of online misinformation is indeed associated with cognitive attraction, namely the presence of quasi-universal stimuli that appeal to human emotions (such as disgust and fear), and for which there is a plausible evolutionary explanation (e.g., the avoidance of ‘dangerous’ animals). Spiders fit perfectly into this scheme, and thus we can expect more misinformation and sensationalism to be associated with spider-related content compared to other topics.”
These biologists and natural scientists may be on to something about contemporary media.
“In an increasingly polluted information ecosystem,” they wrote, “understanding the factors underlying the generation and spread of misinformation is becoming a pressing scientific and societal challenge.
“Misinformation may interfere with democratic processes and undermine collective responses to environmental and health crises.”
Once entrenched, it’s extremely difficult to counter what the researchers call “the persistence of arachnophobic sentiments”.
As I always say, don’t trust anything you read in the news, and not just those about spiders.
