In your morning 'dick move' of the day news, British tabloid The Daily Mirror has run a headline that reads "TV & COMPUTER CRAZE IS GIVING CHILDREN CANCER."
Yeah, good thing you used all caps lest the someone miss the hyperbolic yodelling of your journalistic integrity being flushed down the crapper. While the industry is no stranger to being the scapegoat for society's ills, this is the first time we've seen video games being blamed for giving people cancer.
We all know that the U.S. has had its fair share of idiotic reactions to gaming in the face of tragedy, but this is a new low even for a British tabloid. Guess things like 'fact checking' and 'editorial oversight' don't get as much attention as they used to.
The soon-to-be Nobel Laureate who penned this garbage, Andrew Gregory, makes the astounding claim that "Children who are hooked on TV, computer games and the web are at a greater risk of getting cancer in later life."
Unfortunately for Andrew, not a single expert cited in the article have directly linked game playing to cancer. Astoundingly, a spokesperson for the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health told CVG that, despite what the Mirror claimed, there was no link, zero, between playing video games and cancer. And yet, this story still ran.
We guess when you spend your days penning articles about who's shtupping who on Big Brother, and which AC Milan player has recently dyed his mohawk to match the color of his Range Rover and his goatee, things like 'facts' and 'shit I made up' get twisted around. Tell us your thoughts on Twitter.
[via CVG]
