Paper Monitor
11:22 UK time, Wednesday, 25 January 2012
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
There's no shortage of idealistic young people who opt for a career in newspapers. Having watched All The President's Men, they expect to unearth tales of corruption and pursue the wrongdoers until they are brought to justice.
And then they get the job and discover what a typical story is - how research on penguin behaviour "proves" that women really do feel the cold more than men.
Okay, so Paper Monitor made that one up. But where would the press be without academic research?
Of course there's research and there's, erm research. The Daily Telegraph features a weighty-sounding study from Spain suggesting that frying food in olive or vegetable oil . But didn't we know that already? That's the other thing about research, it can be a form of stating the bleeding obvious.
The Independent contains a rather more surprising piece from the University of Essex about honesty. The key finding is that .
"Lying, having an affair, driving while drunk, having underage sex and buying stolen goods are all more acceptable than they were a decade ago. But people are less tolerant of benefits fraud." On balance it found that women were more honest than men.
But was that because they were more dishonest when answering the survey, Paper Monitor wonders? The article didn't say.
So far so interesting. And then we come to the Daily Mail's research offerings. Within a few page turns we learn that dogs have been a man's best friend for 30,000 years, four hours a day is the average daily TV viewing, and birds have a natural speed limit. Oh, and that .
One wonders how Bernstein and Woodward would have dealt with all these "scientific" findings.
Perhaps Watergate would have been forgotten in favour of a piece about the grooming habits of male caterpillars.
The 
