On Mon, 5 Feb 2001 jacquispeel@netscape.net wrote:

Apparently the penguins do not fall over when a helicopter goes above them (probably did it only the first few times) contrary to some tabloid newspaper reports.

Now this was an interesting exercise in media treatment of science.

A German reporter was visiting the Antarctic, looking for stories. He got to chatting with a Royal Navy sailor, who told him the urban legend about penguins toppling over whenever an aircraft flies overhead. This is, of course, entirely untrue. Nonetheless, the reporter filed the story, which was picked up by various tabloids in Britain and became conflated with a British Antarctic Survey project which involved studying the effects of air traffic on penguin mating habits. The story, as it appeared in the media, was that BAS was spending millions of pounds on getting the RAF to fly over penguin colonies to see if the penguins fell over. In fact, BAS was spending a vastly smaller sum on a couple of Navy helicopter flights to see if they had any adverse effect on the penguin colonies.

The media frenzy was such that the project leader spent a working week answering telephone calls from journalists instead of doing his job -- now there's a waste of taxpayers' money for you. Also a waste of everybody's time, apparently, as these conversations made zero difference to the stories that appeared.

And now that summer's over and the project has been concluded, we get news reports that BAS scientists have discovered that penguins don't fall over after all.

Journalism: the seamy side of the entertainment industry.

Iain