Last week, I wrote about the astonishing "news" that scientists had done something we would have thought impossible: They discovered a new body part!
As I wrote then, the discovery was "amazing, except for one little detail, a detail so trivial I'm embarrassed to bring it up: It isn't true."
USA Today, Gizmodo, Vanity Fair, and Time were among the many news organizations that fell for a sloppy press release that, like a story passed around a campfire, was inflated until little of the truth remained.
As I pointed out then, the first line of the study reporting this finding accurately said that the body part in question–a knee ligament–had been described by a French surgeon in 1879.
Gretchen Reynolds of the Phys Ed blog at The New York Times didn't report the story until Wednesday, which made her a week late. That should have given her plenty of time to get the story right. But, alas, she fell for the campfire fable.
"Last month, knee surgeons from the University Hospitals Leuven in Belgium announced that they had found a new knee ligament, one that had not previously been specifically identified despite untold numbers of past knee dissections and scans," she wrote.
What makes this error hard to understand is that later in the story she writes that the 19th century French surgeon "wrote that during dissections he had noticed a “pearly, resistant fibrous band” originating at the outside, front portion of the thighbone and continuing to the shinbone, which, in his estimation, must stabilize the outer part of the knee, preventing it from collapsing inward." That's the body part we're talking about, and she tells us he discovered it. It isn't new.
Last week, Reynolds tweeted this about the story:
The day before esterday, she tweeted this:
But she did not go back and correct her story.
-Paul Raeburn
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