*Sorry for the random sound issues in the middle – apparently passing taxis were interfering with the radio mics. It was not – repeat NOT – any kind of nefarious hacking tactics from the tabloids…

You’re the affair-er sex, girls!

WOMEN are now more likely to cheat than men, a survey reveals.One in five said they would “definitely” have an affair if they fell for another bloke.

In contrast, just nine per cent of fellas were certain they would betray their partner.

The study of 3,000 people has for the first time exposed girls as the bigger love rats.

Wildly-misogynistic with an undercurrent designed to promote the kind of sexual mistrust which can really damage a relationship? I’m sure I read something similar in the not-too-distant past… oh, yes, that’s right, in The Sun:

One in 10 trick dads

One in ten mums TRICKED their fella into getting them pregnant, a survey revealed yesterday.

Top ruses were lying about being on the pill or just not mentioning contraception.

A quarter of those who duped their man said he ‘would have given in one day anyway’, the survey of 3000 mums found.

But half said they were not even bothered if the father stuck around.

Back then it was a poll by my favourite bullshit-mining marketing team OnePoll on behalf of misguided parenting club Bounty, and caused some genuine controversy, more of which you can read here. Although I’ve not seen anything which confirms this, I’d say the angle and the structure of the story strongly reeks of OnePoll again, but that is of course just conjecture. So, back to this latest worthless PR guff (because I’m going somewhere with this):

It found that women aged 35 to 40 were most likely to cheat.

Many were childless and embark on flings in a bid to get pregnant.

But while 15 per cent of men would forgive a cheating wife or girlfriend, just 12 per cent of women would take back a partner who strayed.

Nearly a quarter of single girls said they would consider a fling with a married man or one in a steady relationship.

Brilliant – so not only are those with girlfriends charged to watch their womenfolk with an eagle eye lest the strumpet stray, but also those men on the receiving end of a fling should be guarded as the harlot may just be using you for your sperm, with a paternity suit and child support payments the inevitable result of your liasons dangereux. Good to see this survey has the full range of deceitful women covered, and the full range of unsuspecting men fully warned, then.

What are we missing so far? Inevitably, the PR paymasters, who funded this whole piece of sexist and insulting bullshit in the first place. And while this next paragraph isn’t the fourth paragraph (in order to obey, ahem, Marsh’s Fourth Paragraph Law), it is the 9th sentence – which in an adult newspaper where each paragraph is more than 20 words long, would be around the 4th para. Perhaps I need to adjust the law to a word-count law… In any case, here’s the money shot:

Only 12 per cent of single men would try to bed a married woman or one in a long-term relationship, according to the poll for matchmakers Coffee and Company.

So this whole piece is a backhanded way of getting the name of an ‘online matchmaker’ into the press. While also telling men that women are up for it. Even readers of The Sun can do those sums…

C and C boss Lorraine Adams said: “Sometimes the need to experience motherhood overrides moral values about someone else’s marriage vows.”

Aaaand sometimes the need to advertise your hook-up site overrides moral values about being a decent human being and responsible with the press you put out, it seems.

So, that’s the polling company (who I will provisionally call UnoPollo) and the PR paymasters complicit in this sexist stitch-up, then. But what of The Sun? Surely they are clean as a whistle, after all they’re just reporting what they’re given, right? I think they get a pass on this one.

Wait, hold on a second, what’s that in the ‘Related Stories’… from back in October…

Vile website urges married people to have secret affairs – Source: The Sun

Oh dear.

AN attractive couple lie entwined in a cotton sheet – clearly satisfied after what seems to have been a steamy sex session.

Cue subtitles for a dramatic finale: “This couple is married . . . NOT to each other.”

The controversial TV ad for an infidelity website caused outrage when it aired in America.

Now, you may think this a little hypocritical of The Sun, having with the left hand poured judgement and scorn (you can pour those by hand, the metaphor stands) on websites set up to help people cheat on their partners, while with the right hand running direct PR copy for identical services. And you’d be right, partly. After all, this isn’t the first time The Sun has promoted find-and-fuck websites – having promoted in April the site ‘F-Buddy.com’ with a story about Jeremy Clarkson’s package.

However, there’s another angle to this – the ‘outraged’ article by The Sun is plausibly and almost certainly not outrage added by the publication (who, after all, published  in the region of 4,290 articles on the topic of affairs in 2010). Instead, I strongly believe the outrage angle is in the original press release by the website’s PR team. The theory goes, fake a controversy and you get attention, tell people there’s a new website coming where people can sign up and find someone willing to have sex with them and it doesn’t matter what spin you put on it, people will come.

Could I be right? Well, let’s take a look at the next paragraph… which is paragraph four…

And now it could hit Britain as part of the multi-million pound UK launch of ashleymadison.com.

Plus the remainder of the piece includes a flattering interview with the website founder, a description of the service on offer, a rate card for website features and a couple of sweet human-interest stories:

He clearly revels in the debate over his business but, amazingly, also tries to convince the world there are heart-warming stories surrounding infidelity.

Like the Ashley Madison Diaries, a book written by a woman trapped in a loveless marriage who allegedly found her Prince Charming on the website.

Or the elderly gentleman nursing a wife with Alzheimer’s.

Thus we see the power of manufactroversies, and negative PR. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, sometimes.

For those who follow my Bad News exposures of the murkier elements of public relations in the news, I’ll be speaking on the topic at Glasgow Skeptics in the Pub on January 17th and Nottingham Skeptics in the Pub on March 15th. I’m also available for other SitPs, I’m sure!

Also, I’m one of the orgainsers of QED, which you should ALL come to – February 5th/6th, Manchester, tickets still on sale, visit www.qedcon.org

Well, The Sun says it’s official, anyway:

Official: England Is Footie Mad

ENGLAND is the most football-mad country in the world, a study has found.

Research revealed English blokes spend more time watching, playing, reading and talking about the beautiful game than anywhere else on the planet. – Source: The Sun

Yep, they’ve got research to back that up. Probably research done by boffins. Probably zany boffins, who have formulas for the perfect cup of tea, or the perfect shave, or the perfect cliché involving zany boffins.

The study found a typical soccer fan watches football — including highlights — for two hours and 22 minutes every week.

They also spend 28 minutes each day chin-wagging about the latest results, tackles, goals or transfer gossip.

In second place was Thailand, where men spend three hours talking about the sport, followed by three-time World Cup winners Brazil in third. - Source: The Sun

Now, I know you lot. You’re a skeptical lot. And this is BadPR, so I know what you’re thinking – who benefits from this? Well, damn you and your cynicism, I’ve no idea what you could possibly mean. The Sun continues:

The research was carried out by lager brewer Heineken. - Source: The Sun

Oh, right, yeah, sorry – this is just a shit survey from lager lot Heineken. Obviously. As Heineken’s PR department continue:

Spokesman Rick Lawrence said: “It might not be the news women want to hear but it seems men really do only think about one thing — and that’s football.

“This is a huge weekend for football and gives men an excuse, if they need one, to talk about their favourite subject even more.” - Source: Heineken’s Fucking PR Department

Sure, why not throw a bit of laddish gender stereotyping in there (actually, as it happens, my girlfriend can’t wait for the World Cup to start, and has been planning EVERYTHING we’re going to be doing in the next month around the ability to watch a couple of games a day. Take that, stereotyping). Still, there’s a few things that are glaringly amiss here, other than the whole bullshit part:

• Heineken isn’t a sponsor of the World Cup, Budweiser pipped them to it, see?
• The article hit The Sun on the 28th – that wasn’t a big weekend for football. In fact, there was no football of note taking place on that weekend (unless you count Milwall vs Southend in the League One Play-offs).

Clearly, something is amiss here, so let’s take a look at the official source of the report – which, as ever, is stupidly easy to find. While OnePoll are taking credit for the success of the survey, the official press release can be found on the Heineken website, minus the nationalistic overtones inevitable added in by The Sun, naturally.

Football Crazy – Men From Around The World Put Football Ahead of Women!  - Source: Heineken’s Actual Fucking PR Department

Oh, yeah, sorry, they spun it with a dodgily sexist headline instead. Should have warned you about that. Still, football ahead of women? They must have something pretty concrete to back that claim up, right?

An international survey, carried out by UEFA Champions League sponsor Heineken, has shown wives and girlfriends are second when it comes to the topics most discussed by men when they get together with their mates.

The study found that overall a staggering 88% of those asked said that football was top of the league for the subjects they talk about over a beer with their friends, with wives and girlfriends coming in the runners-up spot with 45% – work came in third with 34%. Men from Germany and France placed work in second and with their wives and girlfriends coming in third. - Source: Heineken’s Actual Fucking PR Department

Surprisingly, no, they don’t have anything concrete at all. What they have is a load of men saying they talk about football to other men more often than they talk about their girlfriends. Which is entirely different, of course – top of the head reasons:

• I will talk football to a stranger, I won’t talk about my relationships with a total stranger (and they wouldn’t want to hear if I did)
• Experimenter bias in the survey – bias the question towards the desired answer and see how many men fall into line. ‘Hello Heineken drinker, we’re sponsoring the Champions League – would you talk about football to other men more often than you’d talk about your girlfriend, do you think? Here, have a beer, courtesy of UEFA’
• Selection bias – who you elect to take the survey, and how you find them, can be key. ‘Hi there, sorry to bother you as you’re just walking out of Anfield post-match, but would you mind taking a quick survey about football?’
• Etc

So, where does the ‘big weekend’ error come into it?

Tim Ellerton, Sponsorship Manager Heineken International, said: “It might not be the news women wanted to hear but it appears men really do only think about one thing when they get together with their mates – and that’s football. With the UEFA Champions League Final taking place this Saturday it is a huge weekend for football and gives men an excuse, if they ever needed one, to talk about their favourite subject.” - Source: Heineken’s Actual Fucking PR Department

Of course – for those who don’t follow football, the Champions League final took place the weekend BEFORE The Sun ran this advert/story/article. The wise and smart ‘STAFF REPORTER’ thought it prudent to omit the reference to a final which had already passed; unfortunately Mr/Ms REPORTER wasn’t smart enough or professional enough to skim read the story afterwards, and do even the basic amount of fact checking required to find out the season had fucking finished by the time their reports of an upcoming ‘huge weekend’ were printed. Ah, churnalism, how I do love thee.

Still, journalism and PR this piss-poor doesn’t go unnoticed, and even The Sun’s comments section threw in a few lolz to cheer us all up:

Any man who does not like football is usually a bit….funny! – 2lulaura

Casual and unconnected homophobia – lovin’ your work, Sun reader.

Another study reveals that a lot of post grad students are unable to take up valuable scientific research bcoz of lack of funding. - lukep12345

He shoots, he scores.

As anyone who keeps their eyes to the skies – or, more likely, to the news and the skeptical blogosphere – might imagine, this bumper UFO-tastic article follows on not only from the recent strange spirals over Norway (which turned out to be a stray Russian missile, rather than a stray alien emissary) but also from the news that the Ministry of Defense has latterly closed the UFO-hotline. I know recent Righteous Indignation guest Nick Pope was particularly interested in that latter story, which you can hear over on the RI Podcast site. Feel free to have a listen, I’ll wait if you like.

Actually, that’s a lie – I won’t wait at all: if the MoD have decreed alien sightings too unimportant to report to them, I best crack on through the story before the MoD’s lack of interest inevitably trickles down to your alien-believer on the street, and the whole UFO story goes cold. That’s how it works, right? Picking up from The Sun:

Norway’s skies lit up last week with this incredible unearthly looking spiral of light. The phenomenon was dubbed ‘Star-Gate’ – as the world’s top scientists and the military lined up to admit they were baffled.

I’ll stop you there, My Sun – I don’t think top scientists and the military were all that baffled. In fact, while this phenomenon was an interesting mystery to begin with, it was all but over before it began – it’s almost a shame to say it, but gone are the days and weeks of wild speculation between seeing this kind of site and finding the cause. I think there was a time-elapse of around 2.6 nanoseconds between the mystery and the reveal in this case. I guess The Sun must have interviewed the world’s top scientists and military (leaders, I presume) in that nanosecond. Good journalist works fast, time is money and all that. I’m sure that’s it. Still, those bastions of real reporting continued:

And this is not the first mysterious sighting to wow UFOlogists in 2009. In the same year that the government inexplicably axed the MoD department that investigates UFO threats and sightings – despite record levels of sightings in the UK – we have seen flashing orbs, hovering crafts and spooky lights in the sky.

Again, just to interject – the MoD ‘inexplicably’ axed the MoD department? I take umbrage of that – I have an explanation for closing the UFO hotline: there are no aliens. No extra-terrestrial UFOs. In fact, the calls to the hotline were so alien-free, I’d have it renamed the coldline. What we did have, though, was a fair bit of cash being pumped into a department that, during a recession, was ineffective as a threat-early-warning system, but incredibly effective as a waste-our-time-and-funding-with-inane-reports-of-Chinese-lanterns-which-you’re-positive-are-UFOs system. Which is less economically justifiable during the harsh winter of post-Moneygeddon Britain.

So, on to The Sun’s amazing UFO!!!!1!1!! list. And coming in at number 9, the new entry you heard at the top of the show – the Norwegian spinny spiral thingy, which we now know for certain to be a Russian missile. So far, so terrestrial.

Number 8 in the immensely overdone and cliched charts metaphor is titled by The Current Bun ‘The Empire Strikes Barack‘. I suspect they thought of the title first, and were just dying for the first opportunity to use it (I can’t complain, I do exactly the same thing). This was, apparently, the alien encounter captured on film during the inauguration of President Obama, back in January. It’s an oldie, but a… well… shit effort, frankly. Listeners to the SGU (ie everyone who reads this blog, listens to any podcast or simply has ears) might be familiar with this story – if you can call it a story. Personally, I’d call it an insect/bird/bat, flying relatively near the camera, thus looking larger than actual size. This explains 1) the movement of the blurry shape, 2) the shape of the blurry shape, 3) the fact that it is quite clearly an insect/bird/bat, 4) the fact that nobody was screaming, pointing to the sky in horror, running to the hills or offering themselves up as slaves to our new intergalactic overlords (everyone knows the smart move is to get the aliens on side, then take them down from within. Textbook). What I particularly like from the story is the way The Sun quotes ‘UFO experts’. Which is like asking homeopaths if magic water can cure illnesses – I think we can see how a degree of bias might have crept in on their answers there.

So, to number 7, and the shockingly-titled ‘5..4..3..2..1 Thunderbirds a UFO!‘ My money’s on this one being a case of story first, then title at the very last nano-second. There are two elements I find particularly weird about this effort – the first being that it was newsworthy, given the photo’s unremarkable nature. The other element that I find bizarre, is the emphasis in The Sun’s opening sentence:

UFO experts went into orbit in February over this amazing photo of a “Thunderbird” flying high above BOURNEMOUTH.

‘UFO yaddah yaddah yaddah… experts, orbit, February whatever… amazing photo, Thunderbird flying, sure, old hat… Fuck me! Bournemouth! That MUST be newsworthy!’

Number 6 is just plain weird – given that the story is specifically on the amazing photos and videos taken over the last year, the decision to include the story in their ‘Turb-ulence‘ report is particularly bizarre. It shows a turbine (hence the crunching pun in the title, naturally)… photoshopped with the famous silhouette of Elliott and ET on the flying bicycle. I guess the pun-barrel isn’t the only one that gets scraped back at Sun HQ.

Number 5 - a cool photo of a hot-air balloon crashing into a house, that’s only slightly spoiled by the reflection in the window of the interior lights of the photographer’s room. Or so it seems to me. Taking into account the angle the photo is taken from (clearly high enough up to be a second floor window), the grey skies outside which would well have required interior lighting and the shape of the ring of lights being consistent with a ceiling arrangement, ‘UFO all hot air’ seems a dud story to me. In fact, even the quotes from the photographer seem to be cherry-picked and unconvincing:

Darryl, 47, said: “It’s surreal. I wouldn’t have believed my eyes if I’d seen it.”

This could clearly apply as much to the sight of a crashing hot air balloon as to a mystical ring of lights. Lame story, The Sun.

Number 4, and another lovely video, not to mention another unforgivable pun (I see a trend here: poor evidence, poor wordplay). ‘Oo Arr Not Alone‘, so titled because… well… I have no idea actually. Which may be the biggest mystery in this article, given that the mysterious cylindrical object appears to be a Solar Balloon – essentially a binbag, sealed at one end, heated in the sun (the astronomical body, not the tabloid newspaper) until it takes flight. Weren’t these supposed to be the best 2009 had to offer in terms of UFOs? There’s not been a single case where the supposed UFO hasn’t been easily explainable with a plausible and logical scenario, and that’s before you consider that articles 3 (‘Life… But Not As We Glow It‘) and 2 (‘Shock And Orb‘) are quite clearly chinese lanterns.

Eight stories down, eight explainable non-phenomena – what will be the final piece of The Sun’s 2009 dossier on why the MoD ought to have kept the UFO hotline open? Ladies, gentlemen and little-green-guys-who-flew-in-on-the-last-Chinese-lantern/solar-balloon/living-room-light, I give you: ‘Great Scot, It’s Spooky!‘ Yep, another Chinese lantern. If I were BT, I wouldn’t be expecting a call from the MoD to reconnect the hotline any time soon.

Sea Monster of Lake Killarny

Now, I must admit, cryptozoology does next to nothing for me. In the leagues of woo, it’s right down there at the bottom, just below Aliens and above Alectryomancy. I think the reason, largely, is that you’ve really got to try hard before you can get harmed by it. You’ve really got to right out there, on a limb, and fully invest before you can wind up getting hurt. It’s not like pseudomedicine, or psychics, or religion – it’s relatively harmless. Relatively.

However, that said, it’s also pretty prevalent in our media and culture, and for that reason alone it deserves attention. How many people would have heard of a certain large body of Scottish water unless there were a purported Beastie living in it? Not many I’d imagine. Which is why I wearily reached for the keyboard when I (foolishly) glanced through The Sun’s website and chanced upon the Lake Killarney Monster. Blahhhhh. But ok, here goes…

This so-called monster has been sighted in the Upper Lake of the region in County Kerry, Ireland, and was even captured on video – showing exactly how stunning and amazing the sighting actually was! All I’ll say is, don’t feint just yet – the 40-second clip is appalling quality from a distance, and no amount of commentary from crypto-zoologist Jonathon Downes telling us it’s “very extraordinary” will convince otherwise.

Essentially, all you can see is a relatively placid body of water, and then something underwater moves a tiny bit, leaving a little wake on top of the surface. The commentator describes the movement as ‘like a torpedo, and with a torpedo-like wake behind it’ – all I’ll say is it doesn’t look like any kind of torpedo I’ve ever seen. It looks kinda like a fish, in fact.

The Sun’s entirely credulous article tells us that the Lakes of Killarney have much in common with Loch Ness – home of the world’s most famous monster – just across the Irish Sea in Scotland. I’d agree with that, in face – both lakes are trying to provoke tourism by inventing lame monster stories.

What’s amazing to me is that Mr Downes is director at the Centre for Fortean Zoology, and yet tells us he’s ‘Never seen anything like this before in his life’ and finds it difficult to know how to explain it. He offers his take on the sighting, telling us:

“What we saw was a thing about nine to 10ft long. I’d love to say I saw long necks and humps and things but I didn’t. I believe it must be a large eel. It was a pale colour. What I saw didn’t actually really come out on the picture as well.”

Well, I agree that it could well be a large eel, although how he believes it to be 9 or 10 feet long I’ve no idea – he’s stood so far away he’s using extreme zoom to get even the crap footage he presents us with, and even then it doesn’t look anything like that size.

Bigfoot, recently

It just goes to show first of all what passes for credible evidence in sections of the crypto-zoological community, and also what passes for a news story these days. The Sun, it seems, has especially gone on something of a monster-rampage, possibly provoked by the dead sloth we covered in the last episode, because last week it also published an amazing photo of bigfoot. I say amazing, because it’s not often you see a photo of bigfoot that looks so completely unlike bigfoot. This is a rare photo indeed – one where bigfoot is looking a lot like a bear, or a gorilla, or a fuzzy black hairy blob. It’s not often he looks like that.

But, of course, to The Sun this photo is proof, in fact the opening line of their article sells it’s position pretty succinctly:

“This grainy snap of a mystery beast lurking in a garden could finally prove the existence of the mythical bigfoot”

OK, listen up, The Sun – a grainy snap of anything can never prove anything. A really high-quality snap of anything can’t really prove anything, for that matter, now that photoshop is so ubiquitious and effective. The article continues:

“Kenny and Margaret Mahoney set up a motion camera in their grounds after their home-grown vegetables began to mysteriously disappear earlier this month. And when they watched back the footage they were stunned to see a creature resembling a ghostly Dementor from the Harry Potter films prowling at the bottom of their land.”

OK, so are they saying Bigfoot is a dementor? Or that dementors are Bigfoots/Bigfeet? Hard to tell really. But the couple sent the ‘puzzling’ image off to local news stations, and suddenly found themselves in the centre of a cryptozoological storm:

“After we appeared on television we were swamped with phone calls and emails from crypto-zoologists and bigfoot hunters wanting to talk. They all think that we may have stumbled on to something important.”

Well there’s a surprise – hunters of a made-up and largely silly creature see a blob on tv that could be construed as supporting their daft obsession, and so decide to climb on the bandwagon. And speaking of climbing on the bandwagon – well done The Sun for publishing the flimsiest, flimsiest of photos and selling it as proof of bigfoot. At least Penn & Teller went to the trouble of having a decent Bigfoot costume made up for their photos…