Penultimate paragraph syndrome
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Penultimate paragraph syndrome refers to the practice, especially among tabloid newspapers, of running lengthy, rambling stories long on moral panic and false inference, and counterbalancing this with a single paragraph at the end which, with solid and credible scientific sources, dismisses the entire piece — but which will go almost entirely unnoticed.
There are two main reasons for this. The popular explanation is that attention spans have dwindled; a certain percentage of readers read the headline and nothing else, a percentage of the rest will read as far as the lead paragraph, and so on, eventually dwindling down to only a few that will even bother to read the last few paragraphs. But additionally, those who do read that far may have trouble accepting it due to the cognitive dissonance brought on by the intended outrage created by the main body copy. Research into this sort of bias has shown that people who read contrary information may even see this as reinforcing their previous belief - and so placing it at the end sets up these clarifying remarks to actually back up the opinion of the article.
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[edit] Examples
[edit] Cancer jab
For example, in the Daily Mail's headline "Cervical cancer jab left my 12-year-old daughter paralysed, says mother,"[1] replete with sob story, callout boxes, tables, photos of grieving family and so on, the scientific consensus is relegated to the penultimate paragraph: "A spokesman for the MHRA said: 'Guillain-Barré syndrome naturally occurs in the population. There is no good evidence to suggest that the Cervarix vaccine can cause it.'" And for "balance" this is immediately followed by "But Jackie Fletcher, of anti-vaccine organisation Jabs, said: 'We should halt the HPV vaccine programme in the UK until we get to the bottom of whether this poor girl's paralysis was caused by the vaccine or not.'"
Yup. The MHRA gets "balanced" by a spokesloon for an anti-vax pressure group, because the two obviously have comparable credibility. Because, after all, it's always the vaccines. Whatever it is, however unlikely, however strong the evidence that the vaccines are safe, it's always the vaccines.
[edit] Other examples
- Barack Obama sends back a bust of Winston Churchill - The apparent snub is explained in the last two paragraphs, where it's made clear that the bust was on loan from the British government and the terms of the loan expired in 2009, information which The Telegraph thought was less important than Winston Churchill's involvement in the Mau-Mau Rebellion in Kenya.[2]
- Strict diet two days a week 'cuts risk of breast cancer by 40 per cent' - yet literally in paragraph 19, we get "This study is not about breast cancer, it’s a study showing how different diet patterns affect weight loss and it’s misleading to draw any conclusions about breast cancer from this research."
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Nice try.
- ↑ There were two busts, actually. (And it seems that Mr. Boehner is thinking of Alternate Universe Churchill.)