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Source Analysis

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DeCausa, ActivelyDisinterested, The Hand That Feeds You, Nemov and Nigej have all argued that the sources favour B. But we didn'y have any source analysis to verify or disprove that. So I have spent way too many hours reviewing every single source on this page, to see how the media really do write about her. My results are below.

Methodology
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The first thing I did was extract all of the page sources using a sed regex. To be honest, I think there was an error in my regex and I mislaid a couple of sources. I have nearly all of them though, and I don't think any mislaid sources will affect the analysis. I can hunt down the missing ones if anyone thinhks otherwise.

Of the sources on the page, I discounted all of the following because they are articles from before the conviction. It is clear that she would not have been called a serial killer, nor could she be said to be convicted, before the conviction, so these will provide no evidence.

Content prior to conviction

Next I looked for a summary in each article that described who Letby is. The reason is that we are looking for how to describe her in our opening sentence, so relevant information from sources will be titles and summaries that describe her to readers without pre-supposed knowledge. A number of sources did not have such summaries, usually because they are primary sources assuming knowledge, such as live reporting, trial reports, statements etc. These discounted sources are here should anyone want to review these. I note that two of these do have the word "serial killer" in them and one explicitly does not, and I will still note these in my counts.

Sources with no suitable summaries (38)

This left me with the following 48 sources to review. I have included elevant quotes and comment on each line:

Sources with in scope summaries (48)
Results
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So looking at each of these, the analysis shows:

convicted
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serial killer
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If anyone doesn't want to wade through the above list to verify my numbers, I can post the references that match each group. Just ask if that would be useful.

There is a caveat here. If we were doing this source analysis properly, we should weight the sources. In my comments I indicate some sources I would wish to weight, but I have already spent far too many hours on this. My feeling is that weighting would affect the numbers but not the headlines.

Conclusions
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So now, if those numbers are put into a truth table against the 4 RFC options, we have the following.

Source Analysis summary
"convicted" "serial killer" RfC Option (A-D)
F (20%) F (54%) A
F (20%) T (33%) B
T (67%) F (54%) C
T (67%) T (33%) D

Now owing to reporting restrictions and the publishing cycle, there do not appear to be any books on Letby that are not self published. There are at least 6 self published books. But there is one forthcoming book, (Coffey & Moritz, 2024) which, based in the available publisher's synopsis, calls her the killer nurse, convicted of... This is in line with the analysis above.

So that is what the sources actually say.


Ngrams unavailable post 2022. Google analysis would be complicated. The question is how she is introduced to a reader who is not already familiar with the case.

Journals

TV Documentaries

Books


Newspapers


All Sources in article





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