My father warned me never to believe anything I read/heard/saw in the news. Because the articles he read on topics he knew something about were invariably ‘rubbish’, in his view, it followed that the same must also be true for articles about subjects beyond his personal experience.
I was reminded of his contempt for journalism during the summer, when the BBC and scores of newspapers that consider themselves serious reported that the drought was so severe that the source of the River Thames had dried up. The Guardian claimed that ‘river experts said it was the first time they have seen it happen’, though the quote that followed from Dr Rob Collins, Director of Policy and Science at the Rivers Trust, did not actually say that, and the Rivers Trust is in any case a campaign group, not an official body, and is therefore likely to want to talk up the threat to rivers from climate change.
Reuters gave a more-accurate report when it said: ‘the natural spring that supplies the river, known as the source, dries up most summers. But this year the dry riverbed reached significantly further downstream than in previous years’. This accurate point was undermined by another Rivers Trust spokesperson, Engagement Officer Alisdair Naulls, who told Reuters: ‘the Thames would normally be at its source – and there’s a nice pub next to it’. The Reuters report went on to say: ‘the Thames Head Inn is a few steps from a stone that marks the source of the river in Gloucestershire’. In fact, the pub is more than 1km away, separated from the source by the Great Western Railway.
