'Immediate red flags': questions raised over 'expert' much quoted in UK press
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> She does not appear to have social media profiles, though she has two followers on the blogging site Medium.
Talk about damning with faint praise!
Hadn't encountered this phrase before. TIL.
Nice. I'll use that one.
It appears as they could not verify if she was in Oxford at all. If there is no way to check that then anyone could pretend. I would not be surprised if anyone was just relying on the choice of words Santini used when communicating, appearing as overly educated in the British system.
Apparently reporters found her through some services that connect experts with reporters and I’m guessing the reporters trusted that service.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/g228h/til_th...
I do think that the BS-as-a-service aspect of LLM's makes it harder for many people to tell if they're talking to an expert. The optimistic scenario is that this will eventually cause people to be more suspicious of trusting any online source they don't otherwise know anything about.
It really is up to the journalist to verify their sources.
It’s really common for corporate marketing departments to write copy wholesale, so their corporate glossary gets pumped.
Agreed Charlie, but not the way you meant it. The unscrupulous bunch here is lazy journos using UberEats for quotes rather than actually finding and speaking to an expert.
I wouldn't be surprised to find them using third parties to write their articles or find subject ideas too.
It is quite amusing to observe how certain media outlets, which often adopt a self-righteous stance, are now expressing indignation after being exposed for their inaccuracies. They seem to have convinced themselves that they possess the ability to discern genuine expertise, leading them to believe that such experts do not require thorough vetting.
Who is expressing indignation?
> They seem to have convinced themselves that they possess the ability to discern genuine expertise, leading them to believe that such experts do not require thorough vetting.
Speaking of careful reporting, can you back that up?
Their ability to evaluate seems pretty good, as we rarely see stories like this one.
> Who is expressing indignation?
The media is irate and resentful for having been flummoxed by some no-good knave. (third paragraph of the article notes several of them - Vogue, Metro, Cosmopolitan, the i newspaper, the Express, Hello!, the Telegraph, the Daily Star, the Daily Mail, the Sun, and the BBC)
> Speaking of careful reporting, can you back that up?
> Their ability to evaluate seems pretty good, as we rarely see stories like this one.
I beg to differ, and since i am very bored, I had the 3 minutes to find these.
In 2019, Metro published a story about a "haunted" doll, later criticized for lack of verification; the article was quietly removed from their website after public backlash. A 2015 Cosmopolitan article on beauty trends was pulled after it misrepresented cultural practices without proper research. The i newspaper in their 2021 article on Brexit was heavily criticized for unverified claims about trade disruptions. In 2018, the Express removed an article claiming a celebrity’s health scare without sufficient evidence, following legal threats. In 2017, a Hello! story about a royal family event was withdrawn online after inaccuracies about attendees were exposed. The Daily Star's article in 2016 about a UFO sighting was removed after it was revealed to be based on a hoax. In 2017, the Daily Mail retracted a story about an immigrant crime wave after data was found to be misrepresented. The Sun withdrew in 2015 a front-page story claiming a celebrity scandal after evidence was debunked.
Aaaand, here I ran out of bourbon. I mean, I stopped pulling together the BBC articles that had to be withdrawn so I am just giving up the pleasure of finding them to you.
> Their ability to evaluate seems pretty good, as we rarely see stories like this one.
It is no great mystery why journalists so rarely turn their pens against their own. In a profession already fading into irrelevance, its influence waning, its audience drifting elsewhere, few are eager to hasten the decline by airing their own failings. Pride and self-preservation conspire to maintain a hollow façade of credibility, even as the foundations rot away. Better, it seems, to pretend the edifice still stands strong than to admit it is already half-forgotten.
The third paragraph says nothing about irate or resentful (see below), nor does any other part of the article. Did you - the great journalism critic - fabricate it?
The case has been described as a wake-up call for newsrooms, as AI tools make it far easier for bad actors to invent supposed experts for their own purposes. Santini’s output has been prolific, with comments in Vogue, Metro, Cosmopolitan, the i newspaper, the Express, Hello!, the Telegraph, the Daily Star, the Daily Mail and the Sun in recent years. She was also quoted in an article for the BBC’s international site, BBC.com.
> I beg to differ, and since i am very bored, I had the 3 minutes to find these. ...
There are thousands of articles a day, maybe tens of thousands, in the high-quality professional media. You naming a few with errors from a ten years period doesn't amount to much.
> It is no great mystery why journalists so rarely turn their pens against their own.
A conspiracy! Do you have evidence? You criticize the journalists for a lack of accuracy and research - where is yours?
Here's some evidence the other way: Fox constantly attacks publications that differ politically; Fox's errors are reported widely; today's NYT reports on a libel suit against itself; regarding this particular error: "Questions over Santini were first raised by the Press Gazette."
How do you know about the errors? Where did you find the errors listed above?
I would love to dwell into this, alas as i wrote, I am out of bourbon so cannot untangle your relative privation, tu quoque, and what-aboutism.
Many of those media outlets are known for being low quality, with the exception possibly of the Telegraph.
I feel like readers should be able to think critically about their news sources, and expect and discount low quality content from tabloids, rather than blindly believing everything that's fed to them, either by gatekeepers in the traditional media, or on social media.
I suspect this type of thing is absolutely rife, because it can happen in any system where participants don't all have end-to-end visibility of each other. The main force against it is the threat of reputational damage, which usually prompts some level of red tape, but no one likes red tape.
we’re finding out in real time very good reasons why some red tape exists.
The whole team there looks very suspicious.
Performing background checks is not difficult. Professional background check services are fast and commonly used in hiring processes. It seems like this article is (deliberately?) missing the actual questions raised by this case: why are these various outlets/journalists so lacking in rigor when it comes to the accuracy of their content, and how is a fraudulent expert consistently being chosen for their articles.
Isn't this the s/w version of "guns don't kill people, people kill people"?
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20211119031841/https://www.shape...
The UK media has a long history of doing this, it turned up to Andrew Wakefield's house and saw his lab in a shed and said "yep this is a reliable doctor and we should tell everyone MMR causes autism", the fall out of which we are still suffering from all over the globe. It was fraud and the media knew it.