Freelance Unbound

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Via the ever-dependable Soilman comes news that an Oxford academic has set up a prize for the most inaccurate reporting of a piece of academic work.
It sounds like a one-off joke – but the nominations process is outlined comprehensively enough, so it might take off. The project is the brainchild of Dorothy Bishop, a professor at the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University.
Among her books is Understanding Developmental Language Disorders in Children: From Theory to Practice, which would have made her a good contact to sort out the terrible reporting last January on how modern children find it difficult to learn to talk. Or do they? We’ll never know because no journalist asked the right questions.
As Soilman says:

Here’s a fun one to watch out for in future. Journalists all over the UK should be quaking in their ill-informed, assumptive, Humanities-educated shoes

Harsh but, one suspects, fair…

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