Scientist Exclusively Admits Tabloid Exaggerations

“Too much surfing the internet makes you depressed say web boffins”, The Mirror claimed last week. But they were wrong.

Speaking exclusively to Vision, the scientist behind the ground-breaking research admits that the media had distorted her work into little more than scare mongering.

Speculative and sensationalised reporting in the tabloids has come to be a staple diet for millions of readers. Although it may not be particularly balanced or intelligent, on the whole, it is completely harmless. But last week’s internet scare went a step further by frightening people away from certain lifestyles.

Dr. Catriona Morrison, who led the experiment at Leeds University, said the media had “turned it into something that it wasn’t,” by exaggerating and speculating on her findings.

Her study draws links between Internet addiction and depression but makes no attempts to explain which problem causes the other. The researchers had thought the results would help to establish internet addiction as a clinical syndrome, but instead, tabloid readers were scared away from computers.

“We’re not suggesting causality. We’re not suggesting that the Internet makes you depressed,” Morrison explained. “We’re just not at that stage yet.” In fact, she is not even sure how scientists will be able to approach the question of causality, although this will clearly be the next step for research in the field.
The claims that using the Internet can cause depression are “completely speculative,” says Morrison.

Particularly, she criticises The Metro for its coverage of the findings. Last Wednesday, the paper ran the story on its front page with the headline “Internet depression warning for web addicts”. The paper also claimed that “spending too much time online may leave you depressed”.

“That’s clearly not what we were saying,” says Dr. Morrison, adding that, despite this, some newspapers had dealt with it “absolutely fairly”.

But the credibility of the tabloid sensation is also questioned by the reliability of the study itself. It had found that a staggering 1.4% of people were internet addicts out of a total sample of 1,319.

But Morrison now admits that the sample may have not been representative because it was purposely made up entirely of people who use the Internet in their spare time. In fact, the survey was exclusively advertised on UK social networking sites from which people followed links to an online questionnaire.

Dr. Morrison conceded that “in terms of the whole population, it’s probably a slight exaggeration.”
The problem of ‘bad science’ has long plagued the media, but the issue is a two way affair. Busy journalists too often neglect necessary but time-consuming research. Instead, newspapers are increasingly churning out eye-catching stories based on simplified press releases and journalists’ own (most probably unscientific) assumptions.

But this was not a one-man show – scientists are to blame here as well. Although Dr. Morrison repeatedly told reporters that her research did not claim that internet use caused depression, she also fed the media enough to allow this assumption to be made. The press descended upon her and she welcomed them, pleased of the publicity. She gave reporters the lines they wanted and jammed her schedule full with press events, giving interviews during her work hours and until late at night.

Most scientists are keen to publicise the work they do and generally they are right to do so. It is a shame that the public rarely hear about most of the breakthroughs that happen in laboratories across the world. But that is the reality of the situation and we cannot assume media coverage will be fair. It is hardly surprising then that, when fed with findings like Dr. Morrison’s which are easy to simplify and exaggerate, the result is one of scare-mongering. Publicity of science is surely only desirable if it betters the public understanding of science. Coverage of Dr. Morrison’s study however, seems to have misled it.