Sounds like a textbook description of what Ben Goldacre described as Paragraph 19, well worth a google for any new members as it is an expression we use all the time.

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I'd rather shoot Paul Dacre than anyone else in the country- Colin Dexter. A direct quote from the Radio Times m'learned friends

This is the 'Caveat in Paragraph 19', as described by Ben Goldacre
http://www.badscience.net/2010/10/the-c ... number-19/

The guy's comments are in the context of one of the those "eating cheese gives you cancer" articles (*) which are misleading in the sense of being rubbish science rather than (say) evil racism, but he appears to have made a real complaint to the PCC and been fobbed off with this shameful policy.

(*) As it's the DM it should probably be "eating French cheese gives your cancer"

I come here to let off steam, but just get more and more wound up. I'm off now to write an article on how reading the Mail gives you high blood pressure. And watching the BBC turns you into a self-confessed Marxist punk-rocker benefit-cheat.

Yeah, as I've mentioned elsewhere, apparently the headline counts as an editorial and so it doesn't have to be true and can contradict the article it's heading. That can't be a good thing in any situation.

That was a bizarre ruling by the PCC and can't really be supported by any other logic than that it suits some newspapers to maintain it.

Another thing you hear quite often is people conflating the WoD in 1979 with the power cuts and the three day week that happened several years earlier- not talking about younger people here either, but people old enough to remember the seventies, who seem to literally think they happened at the same time.

Won't all these distortions and lies make the jobs of future historians even more difficult? I know that history is constantly evolving. I know that past and present historians have had a difficult job unearthing truths. But with the sheer volume of media we have nowadays, I would have thought that the future historian would have a much more difficult time of it.

Am I being naive?

The interesting/worrying thing about mailite misinformation is how a lot of people claim personal experience of things that are generally unfounded rubbish. Usually it's in the form of "a friend of mine knows someone who was banned from saying "Christmas"/lost his job to an asylum seeker/was forced to be gay by the PC police/whatever" which is obviously a fabrication or at least wildly distorted. Sometimes though people repeat things which are either demonstrably false (a few years ago when 'banning' bah-bah black sheep was the big thing I knew someone who claimed the local school stopped his younger brother from singing it, which was an odd claim given that literally no one else with children or siblings at that school mentioned such a ban) or a distortion of facts (I was on one of those 'work for your dole' type schemes at one point with a guy who said that he couldn't get work because of immigrants and cited the fact that there were allegedly jobs out their for which whit english people need not apply because they required polish/urdu/forrin heathen talk speakers and which I have a sneaking suspicion were translator or similar type jobs). I wonder if this sort of thing occurs because otherwise sensible people who are exposed to this mendacious cobblers day in, day out start assuming these things must be true and therefore remember/interpret events differently or if they are making these things up on their own initiative so as to prop up their petty, bigoted world view in the face of reality.

I hope that was coherent...