Beware The Unsourced Figure

It's the job of MediaWatch to expose when media outlets aren't exactly meeting the standards of competent journalism. One such example was a newspaper doing a beat-up about the impacts of a price on carbon.


As Jonathan Holmes explains, they somehow produced exact dollar amounts for a particular family - based on almost no information. As if that wasn't bad enough, these baseless figures were then treated as if they would affect the family this financial year - even though the carbon price doesn't start for another 13 months. Dodgy.

Hence the Mediawatch headline "Beware the unsourced figure". Sometimes when a carbon price sounds unbelievably high, it might (quite literally) be not believable.

[Related link: Mediawatch on Climate Change coverage]
[Related link: Expert downplays carbon tax price rises]