The antics of Glen Jenvey clearly illustrates that really interesting data are also very often untrue.
Jenvey created some bogus posts to a web forum that were very interesting. He then “leaked” the existence of these bogus posts to the South West News agency which was used by a major newspaper which in turn published an article about the phony data.
This type of thing is commonplace in my work. Here’s how it works. A person or company wants to get something misleading into the news so that a competitor or client sees it, and more importantly, acts on it.
They get somebody to get it into a little-known backwater paper that sends its interesting stories to a large news wire service. The wire story is then picked-up by a much larger news outlet and the story spreads.
This type of mischief can only be eliminated by ruthless fact-checking.
Remember the book “The Terror Network” by Claire Sterling? Based on ‘backwater’ publications engineered by the CIA the blame for many terrorist attacks was laid with the USSR. Nice grey propaganda success. Interesting current use of this trick can be seen with ‘pump and dump’ schemes of penny stocks.