Sight unseen, the BMJ will have clues in both the editorial and the teaser pages pointing up the article. If the journalists involved did not even pick up the actual journal, where does that leave them? I rather hope they realised, and published anyway, in order that others may enjoy the leg pull.

Real scientists have senses of humour too.

Rusty.

"While that might be within the skill set of some journalists, it is not their job and should not be expected of them."

Is further research into a story part of a journalists job? I think it should be, and from a good journalist, I do expect this.

Looking at at just the titles of a few of the references it is obvious that something silly was going on. Was this published anywhere other than ABC and Herald?

Two clicks = 'research'? Oh, come now! Journalists who are paid for their work have a responsibility to do it properly. Their failure to do it properly is partially responsible for killing off the press. If I want fiction, hearsay and second-hand rumours I can get them for nothing from the blogosphere.

Stezza, I can only guess at the answer to your question, but for me, the bottom line rests in the concluding paragraphs of the article, pasted below (which line? The literal-minded may go get their Sherlock caps and magnifiers).

I am guessing the article was originally presented to workshops in Victoria, as part of a health education program.

Good on the BMJ for publishing it. They appear to have engaged more than one journalist in a learning opportunity.

The BMJ comments are also worth reading:

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/eletters/339/dec16_1/b5261
Rapid Responses to:

ANALYSIS:
Nathan J Grills and Brendan Halyday
Santa Claus: a public health pariah?

Tha article is at
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/339/dec16_1/b5261

"Santa Claus is a well known and loved character, but Nathan Grills and Brendan Halyday question whether he is a healthy role model

[article]

"This work was completed during NJG’s participation in Victoria’s public health training scheme, funded by the State of Victoria through the Department of Human Services/Department of Health. The views are those of the authors and not necessarily those of these departments.

"Contributors and sources:
The article was developed after discussions with senior public health professors on role models and norms in tackling obesity and inactivity. NJG is an associate of the Nossal Institute for Global Health, and registrar of the Australian Faculty of Public Health Medicine. He completed an MSc and DPhil in public health under a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University and will complete his public health physicians training in January, after which he is considering a job as a public healthy Santa. BH provided advice on the visual impact of different representations of Santa and helped develop a Santa caricature that might better reflect a public healthy Santa.

"Competing interests: None declared.

"Provenance and peer review: Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

Just a few responses:

Stezza writes: "Is further research into a story part of a journalists job? I think it should be, and from a good journalist, I do expect this.

Yes, research is part of a journalist's job. But *scientific* or *academic* research is not. Checking the references of peer-reviewed articles falls into the category of scientific research and should not be expected of journalists. If we expect our journalists to do that, they'll produce a lot of bad research because they are not trained to do it.

Rusty writes: "Sight unseen, the BMJ will have clues in both the editorial and the teaser pages pointing up the article. If the journalists involved did not even pick up the actual journal, where does that leave them"

There were some clues in the journal but you wouldn't have to be stupid to miss them. (You might need to be a bit lacking in a sense of humour though.) Moreover, most researchers, let alone journalists, do not pick up the actual journal. They will download the relevant article and read that which, in almost every case, is completely adequate.

Stezza asks: "Was this published anywhere other than ABC and Herald?"
Yeah, it was published in about a hundred places. One of the wire services picked it up as a serious story and then when they were caught out, became very defensive, labelling the author a "grinch". (I should note that the ABC did write the piece up as a joke.)

Mutikonka writes: "It's one thing to do the odd silly season story at Christmas, but to quote fictional studies, even in jest, is not a good thing for a journal that is supposedly committed to scientific rigour and opposed to dodgy research."

I agree. Perhaps it would have been ok if the journal had made an obvious attempt to show lay readers that it was a joke. At the very least, the press release could have been labelled "satire" or something. (Some people have suggested that the press officer didn't realise it was a joke when she wrote the press release.)

Mutikonka and Michael Slezak, why don't you check the studies cited in the article and identify which ones are fictional?

At face value, both the article and its press release are about a public health education exercise. My only beef with the article is that neither the author nor the BMJ editor took issue with the following sentence:

"By the mid-1950s Santa had become the leading sales consultant for numerous other companies and products."
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/339/dec16_1/b5261

I wouldn't call Santa a consultant. To me, he's more of an icon.

What journalists and philosophers may choose to infer is up to them. What the atmospherics develop from the mainstream press coverage, say a butterfly wing's vortex into a tropical storm, or a dry statistic seeding a political cloudburst, I cannot predict, as I am no meteorologist, literally or figuratively.

Journalists could have taken the matter up with the author, whose email address and associations are given in the original article. It never hurts to have a primary source quoted.

I still wonder (as is implied by my first post, above) about the civilian casualty statistics in Iraq; and Afghanistan and Pakistan, for that matter. These are also matters of public health and public health policy, for it seems that there are only so many slices in the pie, and both public health and education have been sacrificed for "defense". I say this as a taxpayer, paying for our troops, and the hardware and infrastructure, both offensive and defensive.

What is our Australian policy regarding the state-sponsored and other violence which so outrages some of its witnesses in places like the middle-east, along with those of us who view from more remote and secure places? My most recent searches offer this echo: the US government's declassified document, NSC-68, from 1950.

I don't see much evidence of analytic progress in 59 years: just substitute Al Qaeda for USSR and decide for yourself how it reads, and whether its assumptions (such as you may identify) deserve wider examination. I'm hoping Australia's classified documents read closer to ground truth.

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68.htm