Mainstream media keeps stepping on rakes. This time, they went after bad nutritional advice, but forgot to fact check… anything.
I honestly don’t know what is with the mainstream media lately or why they keep screwing up tech stories, but multiple outlets have been on quite a streak of missteps as of late. In fact, it all reminds me of a scene from The Simpsons where Sideshow Bob repeatedly kept stepping on rakes over and over again.
Honestly, it really is a summation of the media lately. First, the mainstream media managed to get the name and place a Montreal shooter was from and insanely jumped to the conclusion that it was all the internet’s fault (whack, grumbling noise). Next, the mainstream media begrudgingly admitted that Australia’s age verification law was a failure following a study confirming it. So, they decided to say that this whole thing was all the fault of social media (whack, grumbling noise). After that, the mainstream media tried blaming social media for exposing younger audiences to disturbing content… even though the media and their respective broadcasters have long been known to broadcast the same kind of content (whack, grumbling noise).
So, I thought that humiliating themselves for three days straight was a pretty bad streak that was unusual, but they might finally lay off the anti-tech propaganda and talk about something else. As it turns out, the answer was “no”. In reality, I got to see this streak extend to a fourth day with the mainstream media stepping on yet another rake. In this case, it was an extremely obvious own goal where they completely undermined themselves in the span of a mere 7 seconds.
So, who is humiliating themselves this time? It was none other than the CBC. In this case, it was a low hanging fruit story that you would be hard pressed to screw up if you had some basic levels of journalism experience. Specifically, it was about nutritional advice and people posting content on YouTube. The story is found here. If you look at the video, the story sounds quite reasonable at first. There are those out there who are giving nutritional advice that is not accurate and factually wrong. So far, so good. That does happen.
Where things go from reasonable sounding to going completely off the rails is at the time signature of 1:55 in. The reporter noted that the video’s that were being examined for factual errors were not actually fact-checked in the first place. The moment was so goofy, I thought they would realize their mistake and take the video down. So, I recorded my silly reaction to it with the idea that it would get taken down once word got back to executives that the story was really bad. Fast forward to today and it appears that the video is still up. So, it made sense that I would do a deeper dive into how this massive screw up on the CBC’s part came to be.
The actual study in question was found here and it becomes much clearer what the study was actually about:
YouTube has gained popularity as a social media platform providing free access to nutrition information. We aimed to assess the credentials of popular YouTube nutrition content creators, whether evidence was cited in their videos, and if they were financially incentivized through sponsorships. We sampled the 10 most-viewed videos of the top 40 nutrition-related YouTube channels (n = 400 videos). We recorded the training credentials of the content creators along with the presence of scientific references and financial sponsorships, comparing differences between credentials. Of the videos sampled, 22.50% were by content creators with medical doctor (MD) or registered dietitian (RD) training, 42.00% cited references, and 17.75% had sponsorship. MDs (5.00%) had more videos containing references compared to non-MD content creators (mean proportion 1.00 vs. 0.39, p < 0.0001), with most references being specific (the source clearly provided) (1.00 vs. 0.09, p < 0.0001). Content creators with MDs/RDs/nutritionist credentials used more references (0.55 vs. 0.22, p < 0.0001 compared to those without. The mean proportion of sponsored videos by MDs/RDs was 0.10 compared to 0.23 for other content creators (p = 0.09). These findings suggest that YouTube content creators’ credentials may be related to the likelihood that reference citations and financial conflicts of interest are present in nutrition-related videos.
I know there is a lot of data in the abstract, but the main take-away was that the researchers were not, in fact, checking the validity of the video’s. What they were talking about was the credentials of the creators and seeing if there is the potential for a financial conflict of interest. That is a very big difference compared to ‘the video’s contained incorrect information (which was not, in fact what was looked at by the researchers). However, the CBC had no problem banging the drum of misinformation on social media and saying that the researchers were finding bad information in videos:
‘A lot of the things that they’ve heard on social media are not safe or not correct’
Registered dietitian Leah Cahill says people come to her all the time asking about nutrition information they’ve seen on social media.
“Some of it is fine. But a lot of the things that they’ve heard on social media are not safe or not correct,” said Cahill, also an associate professor with Dalhousie University’s department of medicine.
A new peer-reviewed study led by Cahill and published in Canada’s top nutrition journal puts some numbers to the potential quality of information people are receiving online.
Apart from possibly the quote (the researcher might have very well said that as a personal opinion at some point somewhere along the line), but everything else about this is inaccurate and doesn’t actually reflect what the study was actually trying to find. What the CBC is actually doing here is largely editorializing and, as a result, filling their reporting with inaccurate information about the study.
What’s more, this report isn’t even that hard to make in the first place. The research in question was done for them. Information about the paper was spoonfed to the journalist in question. Heck, the journalist even linked to the study in the article which features a nice one paragraph abstract of what the paper was talking about. After all of that, the reporter still managed to screw up the story.
Really, all the reporter had to do was write about how the people who are recording video’s about nutritional advice may not always have the proper credentials when giving out nutritional advice. After that, get a few quotes, grab some B-roll of people typing, speak to the camera talking about these basic things, edit that down and pass along the files to be ready to air. When you have the resources of the CBC, this is not hard. We are talking about novice level reporting, so the bar is not high here. Yet, this reporter completely and utterly failed to reach even this bar.
Over top of all of this is the fact that the topic is low hanging fruit. If you are looking for misinformation online, medical and nutritional advice from random AI generated video’s is probably the easiest thing to find in the first place (at least on YouTube, annoyingly enough). There are actual doctors and professionals giving advice, but the AI voiced junk video’s is just easy pickings for finding this stuff. If you wanted to just borrow a professionals time and browse through video’s to see if any of them feature inaccurate information, you could very well do that. All you need to do is dig up some dodgy video’s, spend a few hours reviewing it, and you’d have a story. Wrap it up with the standard advice of asking a professional to determine what is right for you and dust you hands of this.
Unfortunately, this is not the tactic that was chosen by the CBC, either. Instead, they got a random study they clearly didn’t understand, pushed the messaging that the internet is full of misinformation without checking what they were even reporting on, and graced us with this lemon of a report. It’s frustrating and disappointing, but not entirely surprising given that they straight up told me that it’s not their job to fact check over another scandal back in early April.
To be clear here, the researchers, as far as I could tell, did nothing wrong here. They conducted a study on people’s credentials online. That is fair game. They published their findings. That is completely legitimate. They probably passed their study onto media outlets like the CBC so they can get some name recognition for their names as well. Again, a totally respectable decision. It was the CBC that clearly botched the story and, as a result, find themselves completely humiliated yet again.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.
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