From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

Hey, I'm hard at work producing and writing a show for next week about the nexus of media and politics in D.C.

That will blow your mind.

But in the meantime, we're devoting this hour to the theme of bad data, especially in medical reporting.

We'll talk about an information industry riddled with accidental and intentional error,

dating from Ben Franklin and the Piltdown Man to phony connections between vaccines and autism.

We'll consider a research business model built on painting by numbers,

often wrong numbers. And we'll start with epidemiologist Ben Goldacre, author of bad

pharma and bad science. He is needless to say, one of bad data's liveliest critics. In this excerpt

from a 2011 TED Talk, he gives us a tour of the

minefield of medical numbers, but be warned, he talks fast. I'm a doctor, but I kind of

slipped sideways into research, and now I'm an epidemiologist, and nobody really knows what

epidemiology is. Epidemiology is the science of how we know in the real world if something is good for you or bad for you. And it's best understood, through example, as the science of those crazy, wacky newspaper headlines. These are from the Daily Mail. Every country in the world has a newspaper like this. It has this kind of bizarre, ongoing philosophical project of dividing all the inanimate objects in the world, really, into the ones that either cause or prevent cancer. So here are some of the things they've said, cause cancer recently, divorce, Wi-Fi, toiletries and coffee. Here are some of the things they say prevent cancer, crusts, red pepper, licorice and coffee. So already you can you can see there are contradictions here, coffee both causes and prevents cancer.

And as you start to read on, you can see

that maybe there's some kind of political valence

behind some of this.

So for women, housework prevents breast cancer,

but for men, shopping could make you impotent.

So we know that we need to start unpicking the science behind this.

And what I hope to show is that unpicking dodgy claims, unpicking the evidence behind dodgy claims

isn't a kind of nasty carping activity.

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