It's mostly because the news came from TV writers, Brendan Nyhan writes for CJR: "Predictably, some of them resorted to 'he said,' 'she said' style coverage that failed to make clear just how extreme and scientifically discredited [Jenny] McCarthy’s views are." Nyhan praises two exceptions — Meredith Blake of the Los Angeles Times, and Bill Carter of the New York Times, who said McCarthy's anti-vaccination crusade was based on a "widely disproved theory."
Criticism
Gabrielle Rabinowitz and Emily Jane Dennis offer tips for reading science news critically, including how to search the scientific literature for the data behind the story, and how to evaluate it after you've found it: "Even if you can’t access or understand an article, you can still find out if the research was published in a reputable journal. Look for the 'impact factor' of the journal where an article was published (search for the journal name + 'impact factor')."
Lindsay Goldwert crossed the line from reporting to public relations. In this PRNewser post, she looks back at her reporting days from a new perspective, and she doesn't like a lot of what she sees: "Now that I’m on the other side of things, I am receiving my comeuppance in a big way. For the first time, my professional emails go unanswered – total radio silence. I feel like a nuisance. In short, I’ve come to know the pain of being treated the way I treated others."
When Janet Raloff couldn't get her employer to ante up $15,000 for a reporting trip to Antarctica, they turned to Kickstarter and soon raised the needed money via donations. That seems to trouble Paul Raeburn at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker: "Is this a good model for journalism? Should players like Science News step aside and let freelancers and others with smaller budgets take advantage of Kickstarter? Or is this simply a bad idea? I'm not sure what I think."
John Timmer writes at Ars Technica that press reports of last week's ENCODE research update "painted an entirely fictitious history of biology's past, along with a misleading picture of its present. As a result, the public that relied on those press reports now has a completely mistaken view of our current state of knowledge." Timmer speads blame far and wide, assigning shares to reporters, press officers, journals, and even some of the project's scientists.
In a provocative post at Alternet, Karthika Muthukumaraswamy lays the blame squarely on science writers who feed the public's thirst for easy answers: "They combine decades of scientific research with hearsay and speculation, metaphysical analysis and societal trends, and offer it to the audience in bite-size palatable pieces,” with “hip, new phrases” like Lehrer’s “bias blind spot” serving “as proxies for real explanation.”
"From The New York Times, to ABC News, to HuffingtonPost.com and everyone in between, nearly 30,000 members of the media have quoted HARO sources in their stories," the Help A Reporter Out web site says on its front page. There's no mention of Ryan Holiday, who used the site to dupe major news organizations. Holiday writes about his escapades in CJR. More from Forbes and the Poynter Institute.
A new drug appears to halt Alzheimer's disease in its tracks, at least for some patients. Is it a "breakthrough?" Judith Graham says no on the Association of Health Care Journalists' site, and calls out journalists who suggest otherwise: "Especially on a topic like Alzheimer’s, so fraught with emotion and hopelessness, the responsibility for getting it right – not too dewy-eyed, not too jaundiced, carefully balanced and hewing closely to the facts – is a heavy one."
Adam Feuerstein of TheStreet.com seems to think so, in an analysis flagged on Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview.org. Feuerstein dissects an Osiris Therapeutics press release from last week and accuses the company of falsely claiming success in a study of its stem cell therapy Prochymal: "Figuring out Osiris' deception wasn't that difficult if you know how to parse the language of clinical trial results and look at independent sources of information for the truth."