Read the Damn Paper

100,000 'Addicts' vs. Mainstream Media

There are two important mantras I follow as a science journalist:

• Uncertainty is okay!

• Read the damn paper.

The first is worthy of its own post but boils down to: It’s okay to show the audience that science is uncertain, because science is a process that is uncertain! Let’s park this, but if you’re interested in my thoughts on uncertainty, tell 1000 people about this newsletter and I will write about it.¹

This newsletter is about reading the damn paper.

That’s a self-explanatory mantra. If you’re going to report on a scientific study as a journalist, you should read the damn paper. I want to show you why with a couple of examples in a space that I have been reading a lot about lately and one that has come into extreme focus with Australia’s upcoming social media ban for under 16s: Video games and mental health.

At least once or twice a year, the media seems to pick up on a screen time or gaming study that appears to show some horrifying example of The Children Being In Grave Danger From Playing A Video Game. Twice in the last twelve months, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, our ABC, has covered the topic of “video game addiction” — a totally worthwhile topic, but one that remains the subject of intense study.

The first report, from June 2024, featured on Behind The News, the ABC’s news program for children, and its website.

A second report, in September 2025, went “inside” Perth’s gaming addiction clinic. Similarly, the story ran on video and online.²

Both stories follow a familiar template: A young person explains they have been playing a lot of video games, usually with their friends, and they’ve been enjoying it, but there’s a dark side: They play games too much. The BTN story platforms a young woman who appears to self-diagnose as an addict, while the second story starts with an 11-year-old whose father has become concerned about the time spent playing games.

I want to focus on one key aspect of this and that’s this number: 100,000.

It features in both reports.

BTN’s story is headlined “Australia’s ‘Hidden Population’ of Gaming Addicts” and it even provides a teaching resource about gaming addiction for high school students. In the broadcast it pretty definitively states “100,000 AUSSIE TEENAGERS ADDICTED TO GAMING”.

The second piece, published in 2025, uses this same statistic, stating in its video piece that “earlier this year, researchers from Macquarie University estimated up to 100,000 Australian kids could be affected by game addiction.”

That’s curious: Researchers in 2024 had already determined, according to the BTN story, that there was 100,000 teenagers addicted? Then, according to the ABC, early 2025 research also said this? Where did this 100,000 number originate?

It was easy to track down the Macquarie University press release from 2025 which is headlined “Gaming addiction starts in primary school as screen time soars: new research” and find the number in there:

A new study has found children as young as 10 show clinical-level gaming disorder, which researchers say could affect 100,000 Australian children, with a further 350,000 at risk of smartphone addiction.

There’s that crucial number. The piece goes on to state that around 4% of the population surveyed have “clinical or sub-clinical Internet Gaming Disorder” and the lead author, Brad Marshall, later states:

Mr Marshall estimates the findings translate to approximately 100,000 Australian children with gaming disorder and 350,000 at risk of smartphone addiction.

“These are conservative figures, because a lot of these boys and girls would have under-reported their screen time use,” Mr Marshall says

This estimation is a little confusing, because the data does not seem to indicate this in Marshall’s 2025 study. Based on his data, the number is perhaps half of that.³

It’s important to note also that Brad Marshall runs his own internet gaming addiction clinic. And he has done a lot with the ABC. Back in July 2018, as Fortnite boomed, he suggested that “Fortnite is more addictive than other gaming fads before it because of its easy availability”. I am not sure that there’s any hard research to back this.

In fact, the child in that story, 11-year-old Riley Holzinger, was playing Fortnite every day. His mother, Angie, said in the piece he was “definitely addicted”. So, I contacted his mother and asked how Riley was doing today. Now 18, Angie told me Riley “grew out of it” though he sometimes returns to Fortnite.

Marshall landed on the ABC again, in 2019, with another story about game addiction, where he claims addiction can become violent if not treated. Then again in 2021: Brad Marshall claims screen addiction leads to violence. He claims that he was receiving “hundreds” of messages a day about this when he moderated a Facebook group.

In February this year, he was one of the experts interviewed on the show “The Role of a Lifetime”, described as “a series about how to parent in the rapidly changing world”. Here he is again offered as an expert, and discusses how gaming activates part of the reptilian brain.

Here’s Marshall again, from a transcript in that program:

Despite the fact that it’s nowhere near an MCG and a half (MCG holds 100,000 people, so 1.5x is 150,000, carn Nazeem), the figure appears again.

Marshall’s lab mates at Macquarie University have been on the ABC too, stretching back to March 2023, when Australian Story covered video game “addiction” in this report. It followed two young boys taking part in a trial, conducted in part by Macquarie University’s Wayne Warburton, who is a collaborator of Marshall and a mentor of his.

This story, too, has some interesting science journalism. It displays some graphics suggesting brain scans from gamers exhibited greater activation of a region of the brain that regulates emotion. However, this research does not appear to be published, even two years after it was presented in the article. I asked the researcher if it has been, but haven’t heard a response.⁴

I want to be clear here: These are researchers working in a contentious area, attempting to unravel a thorny problem. I commend them for this work and believe it’s worthwhile. Trying to understand how children interact with and develop problematic relationships with video games is important and it will help protect vulnerable populations.

It also seems reasonable for the ABC to discuss their research with these researchers. However, the problem is this work and research appears to be rarely challenged by journalists — even worse, it seems that most of the time the journalists have not even read the damn paper.

I get why: Generalist journalists, particularly those in big mainstream newsrooms, are not currently well equipped to read and understand scientific papers — this is a big blind spot in Australia, as I see it, and this isn’t just the journalist’s fault and some exercise in shaming. It’s simply how journalism is taught. But as you move into reporting on research, you need to get your eyes on your blind spots, and remove them.

I find it very unlikely the journalists in the ABC articles read the paper or studied the data. For one, the most recent study data is not open access — I inquired with Marshall about accessing it, and he directed me to the Australian Data Archive. This Archive would not give me access without an institutional login. If the ABC has seen the data and understood it, please send it along :)

(Another major Australian paper, the Sydney Morning Herald, also covered Marshall’s recent paper in June.⁵ It did not use the 100,000 figure, but it did claim 1/25 children could have Internet Gaming Disorder. Weirder still, the headline of that article is very similar to the Macquarie University press release. Was the data studied?)

Given that video game addiction is an area of intense research, not always with the most robust methodologies, it would be useful to convey this to the audience. Here we could discuss the uncertainty idea: It’s going to be fine to tell the audience “video game addiction is a research area that has garnered a lot of attention over the last decade and scientists are still trying to unravel the causes and treatments for disordered video game playing” or something similar. I came up with that in 14 seconds! I don’t know the best way to say it! But we can’t just have unflinching analysis that there are likely more than 100,000 Australian kids that are afflicted by a video game addiction. It’s a nice, neat number but it serves nobody.

Additionally, mainstream media consistently platforming the same experts and same statistics is simply not good practice — it does not reflect the reality of the research area that is being discussed.

The solution is two-tiered. First, put a science journalist in the building that is already trained in this area. Places like the ABC (and SMH) have this, so it is frustrating to see they appear to be rarely consulted when scientific studies are quoted or used as evidence.

Second, train your generalist journalists in understanding science and how to report on it: At the Science Journalists Association of Australia, there are dozens of us who would love to help facilitate this. There are also resources like the Australian Science Media Centre that can help, and I would urge generalists who want to cover scientific studies to contact them and ask how they can learn to read and understand papers.⁶

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A couple of scribbles

• I was deeply heartened by the response to the newsletter last week titled “What the fuck is the point of us then?”. A lot of science journalists that I respect and admire shared the piece and various sentences from it. I do not think it was very well-written (a man gone mad doomscrolling chiselling into a rock) but I appreciate that the sentiment got across. I am fearful about science journalism’s future, but I also know there are so many who work tirelessly to Do It Right. I love y’all.
  
  After some feedback from smart people, I want to add to it and clarify that I was not saying its bad form to get quotes or comments that have been obtained by places like the Science Media Centres (in the UK). I merely wanted to point out that by using those and the press release quotes, it seems to show a lack of care or interest in actually doing the job of reporting.

• I do think that the researchers in video game addiction should be stating their conflicts of interest in their papers, including if they are involved in running clinics that treat screen-based disorders like Marshall is.

• I’m giving a talk on science journalism and how to do it better this week at DAI in Heidelberg, Germany. If you’re somewhere nearby, the entry is free and the presentation features a lot of images of penguins and seals.

1. I have a post-it note on my desk that just says UNCERTAINTY over and over again.

On research here: One paper showing that conveying uncertainty to the public does “not substantially decrease trust” for numbers, though verbal signifiers of certainty can do so, a little. Another little paper on reporting uncertainty during COVID, where I think some science reporting lost its way.

2. The chief psych at the clinic, Daniela Vecchio, later featured in ABC’s live, rolling coverage of the social media age limit debate on October 14.

3. I asked Brad Marshall questions about this study and how the team arrived at the 100,000 figure on September 16 this year. He did not respond to my request for comment.

4. I find some of the content of this piece problematic, particularly the presentation of MRI results. I asked the researchers and the journalists involved with the program about this. I will update this if they respond.

5. I asked the journalist about their process and will update this if they respond.

6. Siri Carpenter predicted for Nieman Lab early this year that science journalism would become “plain old journalism”. But specialists are important. The best science journalism isn’t just about the skills, but about the contacts, the experience, the understanding of the culture of science. Generalists can write about science — and should!! and I want to help you do that!! — but the kind of science journalism that can have huge impact on people’s lives is the stuff that dives deep. Specialists are required here.