Mea Culpa: Re diffusion

Susanna Richards seeks solutions to last week’s errors in The Independent

Here comes the science bit: you can’t expect journalists to know about these things (Getty/iStock)

It is a given in any media organisation that, by and large, the people employed there will know a fair bit about language and communication. On matters of science, however, I would wager that almost none of us is especially fluent. And so it was brought to our attention last week that we had, it seems, forgotten our first-year biology while editing an article written by one of our esteemed columnists, who had used a scientific term as a figure of speech.

Describing the influence of Rupert Murdoch, they wrote: “And the boss’s views – on climate, on Brexit, on elections, on Iraq, on capitalism, on the BBC – seeped, as if by osmosis, into columns and editorials.” I was 12 a long time ago; I recall an experiment involving an egg, but that is all I recall. And thus the analogy was able to pass through the semi-permeable membrane known as the subbing desk.

According to erudite reader John Harrison – whose assertion is supported by the entirety of the scientific canon, if only I had checked – osmosis occurs when some diluting element passes from a less concentrated solution to a more concentrated one, which means, if you think about it, that our analogy was the wrong way round. Given the strength of opinion alluded to on the Murdoch side of the equation, surely osmosis would have seen him influenced by the more neutral elements of the media?