Science vs Science Reporting
July 18, 2010
From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
There is a sad truth to this. Science news and reporting is garbage.
First, consider how the news cycle works. News thrives on breaking stories, big changes, sensational headlines. Things move fast, then it’s one to the next thing. Science is much the opposite. Things move slow in science. Ideas are proposed, funding is allocated. Preliminary experiments are done with small samples to determine if there is enough substance to even go on to a large scale experiment. Papers are written and peer reviewed. If all goes well, things move on to large scale experiments. More papers and more peer review. If it manages to get past all this, then the scientific community will accept it. The results are generally incremental improvements in our technology or understanding, seldom are they they breakthroughs.
So what happens when the slow paced science hits the fast paced media? We get news reports that are about as similar to the actual science as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was to the events it was supposedly based on.
At times, the small scale preliminary studies are reported as definitive discoveries. At times, reports are completely opposite of what is reported. Rebecca Watson of skepchick gives a more thourogh rundown of this one.
This is far from uncommon. Worse still, look at any science news article (or political article for that matter) and try to find the original study or paper (or bill or resolution) from it. I wish you luck. Often when I find something like this, it is not uncommon for me to spend upwards of a few hours attempting to find the original source, sometimes in vain.
In the end, be skeptical of what you read in the paper or see on the news, especially if they don’t cite back to the original source material, or worse yet, don’t mention the source material at all.
