The Telegraph offers another example of the credulous reporting of surveys today.

The headline reads: “Women without children should be allowed to take maternity leave, survey says”. The story goes on to say that “women who do not have children should be allowed to take maternity leave… according to a study”.

A study, you say? By an influential think tank perhaps? Or some boffins at a top university? Actually no – it was a survey of 2,000 women by Red Magazine.

Clearly the Telegraph was relying on snaring readers with an exciting quirky headline. If it were true, this would indeed be big news, as the idea of offering maternity leave to non-mothers is as mad as the idea of offering free trained labradors to people with perfect vision, or free lifts around town in ambulances to people who aren’t ill.

But let’s be clear about things for a second. Red’s press release states that 74% of women who answered its survey were “in favour of introducing the option of leave to reassess their career or take time out from the stress of work”. So it might have been more accurate for the Telegraph to say that a lot of women (and probably men too, if they’d been asked) “quite fancy” a break from work, rather than that they “should be allowed to” – a phrase which, combined with the rather loosely applied term “study”, gives the false impression that somebody other than the respondents themselves has considered this.

It’s a bit like asking 2,000 children if they want some chocolate, then running an article saying: “Children should be given free chocolate on demand, according to a study”.

The comparison with maternity leave only adds another layer of confuddlement.

But we should have been expecting this. This is, after all, the same paper that recently brought us “Crumbs: half of Britons injured by their biscuits”.