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ICA 5 - Misleading Headlines

In Class Assignment 5 for Research Methods

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14 views2 pages

ICA 5 - Misleading Headlines

In Class Assignment 5 for Research Methods

Uploaded by

kylefsk
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ICA #5

Student’s name: Kyle Weinman

In-Class Assignment 5: Misleading Headlines

Instructions: Your job will be to figure out if a referenced article is a reliable/trustworthy source
by acting as a scientific sleuth. You will need to consider all aspects of the provided article and
do additional research to determine if the headline backs up the data (from the article itself and
from your other sources).

There is no one right way to do this, and answers will probably vary but the general take-away
should be the same.

The news media article is “Revolutionary digital Alzheimer's drug is powered by music” -
Joshua Hawkins, BGR, 2022 (weblink on Brightspace)

1. Rate how credible this article is on a scale of 1 (not credible) to 5 (very credible)

(least credible) 1 2 3 4 5 (most credible)

2. Justify your ranking from Question 1 - provide 5 unique reasons why you chose this
ranking. These cannot be “I feel like it was a 3 because it was kinda credible” - this
answer would get 0 points.

This article should achieve a 2 on the credibility scale. Although Joshua Hawkins
acknowleged the sources, there is presence of bias in that he writes reviews for music
products and so writing this article about how music products could help Alzheimer’s is a
conflict of interest. The article is also not peer reviewed and BGR is a tech news website that
has no scientific background and little creditability. I could not find anything about the
education of the writer. The title is also misleading and does not represent the article well.

3. Does the author (Joshua Hawkins) directly interview Dr. Born Bonakdarpour? Yes or no,
how can you tell?

Joshua Hawkins did not directly interview Dr. Born Bonakdarpour. You can tell
because Joshua Hawkins mentions how Dr. Born Bonakdarpour told The Daily Beast the
the statements which Joshua recites in his article. Furthermore, these quotes from Dr.
Bonakdarpour that Hawkins uses are from the article, “This Music-Powered Digital Drug
Could Treat Alzheimer’s” by Tony Ho Tran which also say nothing about Hawkins
interviewing Dr. Bonakdarpour.
ICA #5

4. Is the title “Revolutionary digital Alzhemier’s drug is powered by music” based on a


primary source research article? In other words, is there a scientific article that shows
music improves Alzheimer’s symptoms? How do you know?

The title is not based directly off any scientific article. There is a primary source
research article Born Bonakdarpour participated in, in 2022, however, it is not correctlty
represented in the article. The article is called “Musical Bridges to Memory: A Pilot
Dyadic music Intervention to Improve Social Engagement in Dementia. Alzheimer
Disease and Associated Disorders” and does not show that music improves Alzheimer’s.
Hawkins does not represent this source correctly because he does not source it and he
does not discuss the purpose of the article since it does not align with the reason he is
using it in his article, which is to sell the idea of the potential of this “LUCID” program.

5. Write a better headline!

“Could this Music-AI System Could Help Patients with Alzheimers?”


This headline is better because it poses a question and does not jump to any conclusions or
mislead the audience.

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