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Scientists Themselves Play Large Role In Bad Reporting
Hugh Pickens writes "A lot of science reporting is sensationalized nonsense, but are journalists, as a whole, really that bad at their jobs? Christie Wilcox reports that a team of French scientists have examined the language used in press releases for medical studies and found it was the scientists and their press offices that were largely to blame. As expected, they found that the media's portrayal of results was often sensationalistic. More than half of the news items they examined contained spin. But, while the researchers found a lot of over-reporting, they concluded that most of it was 'probably related to the presence of ''spin'' in conclusions of the scientific article's abstract.' It turns out that 47% of the press releases contained spin. Even more importantly, of the studies they examined, 40% of the study abstracts or conclusions did, too. When the study itself didn't contain spin to begin with, only 17% of the news items were sensationalistic, and of those, 3/4 got their hype from the press release. 'In the journal articles themselves, they found that authors spun their own results a variety of ways,' writes Wilcox. 'Most didn't acknowledge that their results were not significant or chose to focus on smaller, significant findings instead of overall non-significant ones in their abstracts and conclusions, though some contained outright inappropriate interpretations of their data.'"
Whereas the mundane gets nothing. For every person murdered, or in a car accident, there are thousands in the area who had a humdrum day. For every house that burns down, thousands don't.
People who hear about these bad things and think the world is going to heck, are forgetting that nobody cares to hear about nothing happening.
Fund science like you fund business, and it becomes an exercise in marketing and hot topic buzzwords.
OK, it might take more energy to make a solar panel than we'll ever get back from it, but look at the economies of scale that we're leveraging!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
So basically, most reporters just regurgitate press releases rather than doing any of that actual journalism stuff. That's not unique to science/medical reporting. It happens in political reporting, business reporting, hell even sports reporting. The bad science reporting is just more obvious because it's easier to debunk.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
If even 1/10 of the hype about "breakthroughs" in solar cell efficiency were actually to be combined and made real in the marketplace, we'd all be charging the utility companies now instead of the other way around.
1. Science is quite boring. By nature it's supposed to be, objective, logical, and devoid of feelings. But Scientists themselves are not typically boring people, they're humans, and humans are emotional beings.
2. Scientists aren't communications experts and suck at making dry discipline accessible to the public. Never was this more obvious than when I was in college. How many brilliant researchers really sucked at teaching? Pretty much most of them.
3. Scientists want to think their work matters, and therefore are inclined to extrapolate applications of their science to the public. When those applications get reported as a sure thing, then an exaggeration is bound to happen.
4. And of course, Science that can be show to be of great public benefit gets funding. Cha-ching!
http://www.beanleafpress.com
And those other fields also often have the same sort of collusion between the reporter and the subject. The noteworthy claim in the article is not that scientists are generating spin that journalists exaggerate, but instead that most exaggerations and errors by journalists originate in such spin.
How that claim became your above "blame the scientist", I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.