Forum Topic

This is how I see it.Steve's original post."Again and again we see cases of journalistic catastrophising!  Today we see a typical example.  A Guardian HEADLINE of  ‘Households face SHOCK increase in Energy Bills from January”.After reading the lengthy article it appears that households, with average usage (£1728 per annum)  will see bills increase by 28pence a month or just over £3 per annum!  Really!!  What a shock!  Many people will now lose sleep worrying. Their Christmas celebrations will be spoilt by the Guardian advising that bills will increase. And in the real world people are losing their homes in Ukraine."Steve and I agree there is plenty of journalistic catastrophising out there.The headline Steve read said "Households face SHOCK increase in Energy Bills from January."That is undoubtedly the headline Steve read, though after looking into it the word shock probably wasn't one used by the Guardian writers. As Steve wrote "In this case I agree that the culprit was somebody from AOL who catastrophised the Guardian article even more!!"Steve also wrote the following "Many people will now lose sleep worrying. Their Christmas celebrations will be spoilt by the Guardian advising that bills will increase."I'm not sure many people will now lose sleep worrying etc. There's a wee bit of hyperbole from Steve going on here.The word shock, not present in the original article, is likely to have been read by a very small portion of people who read the Guardian Article. Anyone who saw the headline that Steve saw and read the article would see that the increase was relatively small.The original article written by the Guardian wasn't, in my opinion in any way, catastrophising.It was mostly stating verifiable facts. Energy price cap will be going up slightly. It had previously been expected to go down. There was mention of it going up (unexpectedly) due to government energy policy. There was talk about how those who have a greater reliance on electricity compared to gas would be affected more as the increase on electricity price cap will be higher than on gas.A few weeks previously, the price cap was expected to fall - now it isn't going to. That is worthy of an article. People who were expecting it to fall would wonder why it hasn't when they get their bills next year.We wouldn't expect our media to only report good news would we? If inflation goes up, we expect to be told. Informing someone of the facts isn't catastrophising.Steve wrote "The source of the article headlined SHOCK was clearly identified as the Guardian complete with logo and any fool could see that. The article was grossly  catastrophised as are so many of the Gaza articles."The headline wasn't the Guardian's headline. It was a headline mis-attributed to the Guardian by AOL. I don't think this was deliberate. However to describe the article as grossly catastrophised is well off the mark in my opinion.

Andrew Jones ● 19d

Thanks Steve.The screengrab you sent me shows three articles (in an AOL news feed, viewed on a mobile phone app) that you can click on, the first an advertisement for supplements, the second a Guardian article titled "Households face shock increase in energy bills from January" with a cropped version of a photo that was in the online guardian article. The third article was a press association article about Ben Stokes and the cricket.What AOL appear to do is take the source article and re-format it e.g.Here is an independent article I found on AOL News today in its original online versionhttps://www.independent.co.uk/news/israeli-benjamin-netanyahu-palestinian-west-bank-jerusalem-b2869931.htmland here is the AOL 'version'https://www.aol.co.uk/articles/netanyahu-convenes-cabinet-settler-violence-110529377.htmlThe above two articles look similarish (but clearly different) when viewed on a PC. It doesn't automatically follow that something viewed on a mobile would look exactly the same as on a PC - content will often be displayed differently due to the differences in size, screen layout etc between PCs and mobiles.Why there is a difference in title between what the original guardian article was headlined i.e. "Households in Great Britain face a surprise rise in energy bills from January" isn't something I would know.I could hazard a guess that if you are looking at AOL on a mobile phone, then AOL might change the leaders to make something shorter and snappier e.g. removing the words Great Britain, and in this case the word surprise seems to have been changed to shock, significantly changing the headline.I stress this is just a guess on my part, but I'm not convinced that the Guardian used the word shock in their original article. They might have done, and then changed it of course, but it seems more likely (to me) that the change was made by AOL.

Andrew Jones ● 22d