In the film A River Runs Through It, we see a young Brad Pitt, acting as Paul Maclean, being home-schooled by his father, Reverend Maclean.

Brad is told to write an essay. He does and brings it back to his father to read. He reads it, hands it back and says: “Good. Half as long.” So Brad goes off and edits the essay down and brings it back and the reverend, who reads it, hands it back and says: “Good. Half as long.”

This goes on and on. The point is that any piece of writing can do with some severe editing and can still carry the same message. But no longer. With print media, paper and printing are costly and text and editorial pieces are accurate and concise. It is different for Internet stories. Here, the editorial pieces are ramblingly long – all so as to make the reader deal with adverts, pop-ups and so on. The journalism and accuracy of the editorial pieces are very poor.

A few examples of pathetic inaccuracy will illustrate the point. It are reported that 17-year-old Cynthia Sin Nga Lam, one of 15 finalists in this year’s Google Science Fair, has invented a water purification device which produces electricity. The report states: “Dirty water goes in one end, and a titanium mesh, activated by the sun, sterilises the water and sends it through an extra filter. The photocatalytic reaction also splits the water into hydrogen and oxygen – so, someone can flip a switch and start feeding a hydrogen fuel cell to produce clean power.” Well, well.

The report goes on to say that “the device is also low cost”. Ah, as Shakespeare wrote, “there’s the rub”. In point of fact, titanium mesh and fuel cells are not cheap. Also, the device will not work very well.

Our next report is from a car manufacturer that claims to have invented an active noise-cancelling device which “can accurately detect, analyse and cancel out noises affecting the driver, front passenger and rear-seat occupants separately, reducing in-cabin noise by 3 dB”. Wrong. First, humans do not hear in decibels; they hear in decibels which are A-weighted to mimic human response to sound. And then, while a 3 dB reduction is technically a 50% reduction, it will not be perceived by humans as being so. They will only notice a reduction of about 6 dB or more.

We read on: a report states that Bill Gates has produced a company called Heliogen, which uses solar mirrors to produce temperatures of “more than 1 000 ºC” which, it is claimed, can be used for melting steel or refining cement production. Wow! One presumes the plant runs a day shift only. I could go on with more “Wow! How about that! Isn’t science wonderful!” reports, but you get the idea.

It was once that journalists were very talented people. They had to write concise, accurate articles which set standards for excellent use of grammar. This was in contrast to the popular image of the newspaper reporter who was depicted as spinning every story, inventing fake news, being unreasonably biased. But now it seems the wheel has turned full circle. I think it is because the rules have gone. The Internet writers form an ever increasing group of ‘those who know not’ and ‘those who know not they know not’.

It should be obvious: if a 17-year-old has come up with a cheap electricity generating water filtration device, how likely is this to be true? Would the 17-year-old manage to ace water research labs worldwide? If Gates has something which can melt steel from the sun, is this possible, given how long it takes to cook the steel up, if this has to happen during daylight? If a car manufacturer has a noise-reduction device, has nobody thought of this before? But no, the news reporter of the Internet just blunders forward with fake science and worthless, ad-filled content. Shame.