Media sensationalism - Daily Mail Oncology Ontology

[Marcus]

I think there are a couple of sites like it, but this is one example of an attempt to help the Daily Mail in its apparently ongoing project to classify everything in the world into things that cure cancer and those that cause it.

On the one hand, we can just laugh at the Fail's unbounded lowbrow stupidity.

On the other hand, a brief perusal of the stories coupled with Google Scholar (especially if you get institutional access to research publications) will show they're invariably somewhere between over-hyping tentative research findings and outright misrepresentation, and yet this is the source of knowledge on the current state of scientific research for a large number of people, some of whom can walk, breathe and chew gum at the same time.

Is this a major problem? Should there be some sort of requirement for accuracy in the presentation of scientific findings, or does the freedom of the press supercede the desirability for accuracy?

 

[ImprobableJoe]

I think there are a couple of sites like it, but this is one example of an attempt to help the Daily Mail in its apparently ongoing project to classify everything in the world into things that cure cancer and those that cause it.

On the one hand, we can just laugh at the Fail's unbounded lowbrow stupidity.

On the other hand, a brief perusal of the stories coupled with Google Scholar (especially if you get institutional access to research publications) will show they're invariably somewhere between over-hyping tentative research findings and outright misrepresentation, and yet this is the source of knowledge on the current state of scientific research for a large number of people, some of whom can walk, breathe and chew gum at the same time.

Is this a major problem? Should there be some sort of requirement for accuracy in the presentation of scientific findings, or does the freedom of the press supercede the desirability for accuracy?

It is a bigger problem than you know, because you know who else reads this garbage? The people who make our laws.

See, the real problem is one of "division of labor" in modern society. There are too many things that directly affect our lives that we can never become experts on, so we depend on other people to be experts for us. That's a good thing: when your car breaks down and you need your tonsils taken out, you don't want to have to learn auto repair while your buddy learns basic surgical techniques before you can fix the problems. In large part, for our understanding of the world we turn to the media to give us a summary of what's going on.

Unfortunately, journalism is a for-profit industry, and capitalism has a way of destroying certain professions. Real reporting takes an expenditure of cash and time and personnel, and those things cut into the bottom line. So very little real reporting gets done. Instead, we have people with no knowledge of a subject throwing a couple of quotes under a photograph they got from the Internet, and calling it journalism. Someone with a journalism degree might have taken "Biology for non-science majors" in college, 15 years ago. They simply aren't qualified in getting things right, and they don't have the time or interest in taking the time to get things right. Even magazines have cut their staffs and budgets to the point that they seem to be generally incapable of spending enough time on science reporting to get their facts straight.

It also shows the level of disinterest in reporting science in general. If someone screwed up a report on a sporting event as badly as they screw up science reporting, they would get fired after the second or third day. Science? Who cares about that?

 

[Marcus]

The situation is exacerbated by the place scientists take in our culture. As you say, most journalists don't know shit about science. The problem is that most politicians, if they have higher education at all, tend to come from a humanities background. Many simply won't see what the problem is if you sensationalise scientific findings to make a story more "exciting" - after all, they're used to putting spin on everything they say. Of course, as soon as scientists call the tabloids on this crap people accuse them of either changing their minds or being involved in a cover-up.