The Element Wrongium

Salvatore Babones has a useful Quadrant piece on an item of fake news about India.


Wrongium, the Media’s Favourite Element

Everyone likes a good beat-up. On May 31, Nature magazine—the world’s most prestigious scientific journal—published a news article under the headline “India Cuts Periodic Table and Evolution from School Textbooks”. Do notice that, according to Nature, they cut evolution too.

Why would such a science-obsessed country as India do something so stupid? The standard take across Western media is that a religiously conservative government has declared war on rationality. Richard Dawkins went so far as to belittle Hinduism an “idiotic religion”.

The actual answer is all of this is fake news. Neither the periodic table nor evolution has been dropped. The periodic table was moved from Year 9 to Year 11, and evolution was moved from Year 9 to Year 12.

Worth reading the whole piece as a reminder of a common problem, the failure to check what seems like a good story. It seems to be editorial policy in many cases - don't check it, just use it. Climate change stories being a familiar example.

It is all too easy for Western media organisations to be co-opted into political battles they don’t understand, especially when they are all too willing to believe narratives that seem consistent with their own world-views. This is how fake news is created, spread, and made authoritative. Indian and other Third World intellectuals routinely dupe credulous Western reporters with stories like these. And in most cases those Western reporters not only don’t correct their stories, but never even come to know they’ve been used.