People buy magazines to read anyway, and most established magazines already have fairly stable readerships. The practice of hyping up a story is nothing more than an attempt to increase readership by providing something that they think is more eye-catching or intriguing to interest new readers.

But a gimmick that misleads is still a lousy way to do it, since a mag will drive about as many of their subscribers away as they attract. It’s just too bad that publishers listen more to their ADVERTISERS than they listen to their SUBSCRIBERS. (Anyone can see that increased circulation is profitable to the advertisers, and since much if not most of a magazine’s revenue is paid for by advertisers, publishers tend to defer to their arm-twisting).

Ever notice what a newsstand full of mag covers all vying for attention utilize most? A ludicrous preponderance of the color RED and as many exclamation marks as possible. It’s like facing a concentration of mini-billboards. It gives me a blinding headache every time.

I mean, come ON already! If the Earth and all of it’s stuff didn’t form in space, just where is it supposed to have come from?

It took me a while to catch on to the ‘tabloid’ factor of all these type of magazines but when I did I stopped buying them. It is a real shame that even magazines devoted to science can suffer from this sort of headline scamming so frequently seen in tabloid newspapers.

The thing is the hype and exaggeration surrounding these stories tends to spill over into other areas … sometimes even blogs.

By the crack “CSI” staff, no doubt.

I disagree about the phrase “component molecules of DNA.” To me, this means exactly what was discovered in the meteorite: compounds that could lead to to DNA and RNA. In short they found the molecular equivalent of a bag of loose parts. The fact that they found a molecular bag of loose parts that might, if you hold your mouth right, eventually form DNA or RNA is what’s significant, and that significance is summed up in “subtitle.”

However, when Wöhler synthesized by the first time (1820s) an organic compound (urea) from inorganic substances, Mary Shelley wrote “Frankenstein”.

Imagination actually consists in filling the gaps.

Okay, so it was just a guy eating a hot dog… but the headline sold newspapers!

Gives a whole new meaning to the expression “getting your rocks off”.

That headline is an outright lie: “genetic material” means “the presence of genes in this material.” My understanding is that they found some compounds that can be precursors to DNA. You can have intact, complete, biologic DNA in double helix B-form that is not genetic material simply by not including the sequence of a gene in the nucleotides of the strands present. Genes are higher level organization.

Somebody should smack PopSci around for a while; they need to work on the veracity of their reporting.

(though I insisted that part of my contract here at BA is that I do all my own stunts and headlines)

And we have suffered your horrible puns ever since.

Yup… I still shake my head and groan every time of think of my favorite most recent BA punchline… err… headline…

Cheeses of Nazareth

I saw something on the news that completely illustrates this point, although it’s a pretty common and well-known practice. On the cover of one of those ridiculous entertainment magazines they showed a picture of what looked like Angelina Jolie tripping and falling while she was pregnant, with the headline “ANGELINA FALLS WHILE PREGNANT” or something of that nature. Turns out the cover picture was of someone helping her up slowly after she was sitting down quietly on the beach. Of course the magazine simply said that they had a microscopic caption under the picture, which was their legal loophole in the event someone called them out on their intentionally misleading caption all in the desperate attempt to get people to read their pathetic magazine.

It’s the same reason that “reality TV” is completely engineered in the editing room and bears absolutely no resemblance to the events that actually take place. The media is a joke. There is no discipline and no standard. Ratings equal money, and everyone will do anything to scam as many people as possible into surrendering their attention. The sad thing is that most people don’t even realize they’re being made a fool of. When watching these reality TV shows, they don’t even understand the practice of taking clips from entirely different times of filming and piecing them together to make everything seem as though it’s happening the way the producers of the show want it to.

As I said, most people know by now, after so many years of the “reality TV” style of entertainment, how shameless the media is when it comes to this. But you, me, and people like your readers are too intelligent to be duped by this stuff. And regardless of whether or not you can blame the writer of the article itself, it’s still a problem that we all know won’t go away any time soon.

Personally, I believe the extraterrestrial origins of life theory is the most probable explanation for how life started on the “blue marble” if for nothing else, then only that it will be another big blow for creationists and their alikes.

And we have suffered your horrible puns ever since.