The last we heard from John Bohannon, he was proving that many open-access journals will print almost anything. Now he's showing how quickly the popular media will jump on a (phony) study claiming that chocolate can help you lose weight: "The key is to exploit journalists' incredible laziness." Also, Gary Schwitzer says the problem may be even worse than Bohannon thinks. But Rachel Ehrenberg says the stunt was unethical.
Criticism
HealthNewsReview.org takes BMJ to task for being inconsistent with its caveats in two recent news releases from its journals. In one case, from the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the text of the release was correctly worded but a headline was not: "You can’t have it both ways. In one line you admit, appropriately, that cause and effect has not been established. But up at the top, you allow researchers to get away with a huge, powerful cause-and-effect claim."
The Food Babe phenomenon is a challenge for journalists like Julia Belluz, who second-guesses her own coverage: "Perhaps I should have dedicated many more reporting hours to debunking her ideas. Or perhaps I should have continued to ignore her altogether. Maybe drawing any attention to Hari would help popularize her message — making me complicit in spreading misinformation." More from Keith Kloor and Michael Hiltzik.
The Columbia journalism school's damning report on Rolling Stone's discredited rape story was especially critical of its use of made-up names for the alleged attacker and three friends who supposedly talked to the victim after the rape, Roy Peter Clark writes: "Of all the problems with the Rolling Stone story, its promiscuous use of pseudonyms stands as a kind of gateway drug to more consequential forms of malpractice." More from Steve Buttry.
Suzanne Jacobs discusses a study by a team of U.S. and British researchers who examined news coverage of the latest series of IPCC reports and concluded that journalists in both countries lost interest as the reports dribbled out in three parts: "Ultimately, this kind of assessment could help both scientists and journalists better communicate these kinds of big reports. It’s clear, for example, that the three-tiered release can result in waning interest over time."
How often does a new medical treatment actually make it to clinical use? Almost never, Julia Belluz writes in an indictment of "breakthrough" journalism: "We don't wait for scientific consensus; we report a little too early, and we lead patients and policymakers down wasteful, harmful, or redundant paths that end in dashed hope and failed medicine. This tendency could be minimized if we could only remember that the overwhelming majority of studies in medicine fail."
Sarah Kaplan recaps the Toronto Star's misadventure in investigative science journalism, now retracted but still online elsewhere for now. Part of the problem, Kaplan writes, lies in the differences between science and journalism: "All reporters face dueling pressures when covering medicine and other science issues. On the one hand, they want to craft a compelling narrative. On the other, science values statistics, not stories and anecdotes."
Julia Belluz writes that a Toronto Star story about the HPV vaccine won praise from Andrew Wakefield but condemnation from doctors and public health officials: "The story was, at its core, a collection of unproven anecdotes that suggested, among other things, that dozens of women north of the border had been harmed or worse by the Gardasil HPV vaccine," Belluz writes. The Star has since added a disclaimer and changed its headline.
Gary Schwitzer's resuscitated HealthNewsReview.org has hit the ground running with posts criticizing reporters (in two examples last week) for confusing correlation with causation regarding coffee drinking and melanoma occurrence, or Twitter use and heart disease: "It’s a story of the type we see increasingly – apparently based entirely on a news release with no independent vetting of claims, and misinterpretation of those claims that were made by the researchers."
That cancer-risk story that ran over the holidays drew a lot of criticism, for the scientists that authored the underlying study and the reporters who wrote that two-thirds of all cancers are caused by bad luck. Now, Science's Jennifer Couzin-Frankel writes about what went wrong: "Distilling the story — with space constraints, with a desire for clear writing that will hold readers’ attention and help them understand — carries risks for scientists and for journalists."