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Caveat Emptor

The opinions expressed on this page are mine alone. Any similarities to the views of my employer are completely coincidental.

Monday 1 July 2013

Making up the news

It's always gratifying when one sees reports of one's colleagues research in the news, so it was with interest that I read  the BBC education correspondent Angela Harrison's gloss on Tak Wing Chan & Vikki Boliver's research into 3 generational social mobility. 

What is really weird (and a trifle sinister) is the last two paragraphs of the BBC article. These have nothing whatsoever to do with the research being reported on and are nothing less than a shameless - and poorly informed - plug for the BBC funded Great British Class Survey. OK, so media organizations help create "the news" by selecting what to report, someone has to. But it takes things to a new level when the news organization is actually creating contentious content that it clearly doesn't understand and then  reports on it as though it is fact...

BTW I've sent a polished and (stylistically) revised version of my original blog post on the GBCS, including some new critical content, as a longish comment to the journal Sociology. It will be interesting to see if they will publish it.

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