Bad Science Journalism Gets Schooled

TaeKwonDood writes "Biology post-doc Dr. Michael White takes a look at the '2007 Best American Science and Nature Writing' and doesn't like what he finds in an article called Bad Science Journalism and the Myth of the Oppressed Underdog. Turns out it's not just political writers who pick a position they want to advocate and then write stories to confirm it. Science journalism gets a scolding and it's been a long time coming."

Comments

Par for the course

[TheMeuge]

This is merely par for the course... and the observations made in the TFA are not new either. I encounter them every day on Slashdot!

HIV not causing AIDS conspiracy, Fluoride in the water conspiracy, Cancer being cured but evil corporations in league with all scientists not releasing the cure... I have to endure this every single day.

I think the more interesting subject to explore, is the psychology of why people are so eager to believe the improbable, and far more likely to accept an outrageous exaggeration, a halftruth, or an outright lie, merely to spite the establishment. As a scientist, that's a subject that interests me the most, because I would like to locate the part of the brain that will believe that the herbs in "Airborne" will miraculously prevent you from getting a disease, but will refuse to accept scientific principles and facts that have held firm under scrutiny for decades.

Politically Correct bias?

[grassy_knoll]

Given the example in the article, and this quote:

What gets lost is the scientific method, the idea that novel proposals need to be thoroughly vetted and tested, no matter how intuitively attractive they are.

Perhaps the bias in reporting is due to the "intuitive attractiveness" of the conclusion?

The opposite might be true as well. For instance, I didn't hear much about this study:

In recent years, Putnam has been engaged in a comprehensive study of the relationship between trust within communities and their ethnic diversity. His conclusion based on over 40 cases and 30 000 people within the United States is that, other things being equal, more diversity in a community has a correlation [expressed as a beta equal to 0.04 in a multiple regression analysis (see Putnam, 2007)], to less trust both between and within ethnic groups. Although only a single study, limited to American data, and the Census tract Herfindahl Index of Ethnic Homogeneity only explaining 0.16 % of the variance in trust in neighbours in the regression model presented (Putnam, 2007) it claims to put into question both contact theory and conflict theory in inter-ethnic relations. According to conflict theory, distrust between the ethnic groups will rise with diversity, but not within a group. According to contact theory, distrust will decline as members of different ethnic groups get to know and interact with each other. Putnam describes people of all races, sex and ages as "hunkering down" and going into their shells like a turtle. For example, he did not find any significant difference between 90 year olds and 30 year olds.

You'd think a Harvard professor saying in effect that diversity has a down side might be news worthy, unless that idea isn't attractive to the majority of the news media.

Re:obvious != right

[Rei]

And yet, you see it all the time. For example, the article about the cook/tax dodger/inventor who came up with a perpetual motion machine which was posted on Slashdot a month or so ago. Or Pimentel's annual widely publicized reports on ethanol being energy negative, despite everyone else's studies coming up with numbers of about 30% positive. Or pretty much every article about anyone who challenges anything about global warming. It's always the plucky renegade scientist who discovered some brilliant notion that everyone in the scientific community had missed but the other scientists are too jealous/blinded by hubris in their ivory towers to see and accept what should be so obviously true to everyone else.

Can you cite these?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you cite these thousands of studies over one hundred of years? I am truly interested in them.