Apologies for yet another media-rant, but this one raises my marsupial hackles.

A startlingly lazy Times today includes an article dramatically headlined "Ugly Children May Get Parental Short Shrift," and accompanied with a comically alarming illustration.

The article does little more than pad the press release put out by the author.

The basic idea is that researchers observed how often parents strapped in children riding in supermarket shopping carts, and concluded that the good looking kids were strapped in much more often than the aesthetically challenged.

As described, the methodology of the study is obviously flawed:

With the approval of management at 14 different supermarkets, Harrell's team of researchers observed parents and their two to five-year-old children for 10 minutes each, noting if the child was buckled into the grocery-cart seat, and how often the child wandered more than 10 feet away. The researchers independently graded each child on a scale of one to 10 on attractiveness. [Wombat-added emphasis]

Although reasonable means (scroll down to the comments) of dealing with the subjective nature of "attractiveness" are conceivable, the sub-undergraduate attitude toward data collection adopted here should have made any science reporter worth his or her NaCl pass this one up faster than you can say "cold fusion."

Further, the the study's author claims that his data is best understood through the lens of evolutionary biology: "pretty children, he says, represent the best genetic legacy, and therefore they get more care." To the Times's credit, they found a couple of academics willing to point out the absurdity of Harrell's claim.

Still, the fact that this nonsense passed muster at the Times is pretty dispiriting. To (lazily ourselves) steal a page from Ed, Nicholas Banakar and his editor should get no brownie. (And yes, the Times are only one among many. But they are my hometown paper.)