October 25, 2012

Journalists have to get it from somewhere

A new paper in the (open-access) journal PLoS Medicine looks at ‘spin’ in reporting of scientific findings in the mass media, in press releases, and in the scientific papers underlying the press releases.

They found that the scope or importance of scientific findings were exaggerated in about half the media stories, almost always based on what was in the press release.  That’s not at all surprising.  The interesting part is that ‘spin’ in the press release often followed ‘spin’ in the scientific paper itself.  That is, it’s not just that the scientists cooperate with the university press office, they even exaggerate when writing for other scientists.

This doesn’t exonerate the journalists in cases of science puffery.  In sports, we expect the media to detect and ridicule any attempt to treat an ordinary All Blacks recruit as the second coming of Colin Meads.  They should also be able to tell the difference between a modestly interesting test-tube experiment and a ground-breaking clinical trial.

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar
    Ben Brooks

    Another new tactic is to provide an embargoed briefing, so that journalists can report the positive aspects of the paper (as provided by the authors), but are forbidden from approaching any other experts in the field who might offer a more critical response. The BBC has refused to accept briefings on this basis, but other outlets haven’t been so principled.

    11 years ago

  • avatar

    Isn’t a lot of the problem that the journalists don’t know enough to be able to spot the spin. We just don’t have enough journalists well trained enough in scientific areas to know just how much of what they are told is spin.

    11 years ago