I was annoyed at the first story I read on this, because the headline was "upper ear piercings are dangerous" and the evidence in the story is "mall piercings, and piercing guns, are dangerous."
*nod* I'd caught a television news broadcast about this sometime in the past few days, and their headline was about how dangerous upper ear piercings are, but the content of the story was a bit more balanced -- saying it was a higher risk of infection and the infections there tend to be more serious, but at the same time very much not telling people "don't do that", just telling people to be careful. I don't recall having heard this particular detail in that piece though.
I liked the fact that for this story they spoke to a proper professional piercer, mentioned that piercing guns aren't even really proper for lobe piercings and made it clear that using a gun for a cartilage piercing is a Known No-No (hey, second and third paragraphs, before anyone will have started skipping ahead!), and pretty much conveyed the fact that the problems came from improper procedure, not an OhMyGodThisIsSoDangerousTellYourKidsNotToDoThis choice of piercing.
It would be interesting to compare the Level Of Clue between newspaper reports and telelvision reports of this story. I wonder whether the trend I expect would be present in the data.
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I liked the fact that for this story they spoke to a proper professional piercer, mentioned that piercing guns aren't even really proper for lobe piercings and made it clear that using a gun for a cartilage piercing is a Known No-No (hey, second and third paragraphs, before anyone will have started skipping ahead!), and pretty much conveyed the fact that the problems came from improper procedure, not an OhMyGodThisIsSoDangerousTellYourKidsNotToDoThis choice of piercing.
It would be interesting to compare the Level Of Clue between newspaper reports and telelvision reports of this story. I wonder whether the trend I expect would be present in the data.