I'll be sad if this is the beginning of corrupting Clarke's Law in the popular imagination from "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" to "Any sufficiently crappy research is indistinguishable from fraud".
This is pretty weak and unscientific evidence. The author, directly or indirectly, lumps politicians like Bill Clinton and for-profit business like Scripps into the “science” boat, which in my opinion, is bad reporting. Those are not evidence of the academic field gone awry. A small list of gaffs by institutions doesn’t say anything about the magnitude, and completely ignores how much is going right with science.<p>There’s no question that <i>some</i> academic institutions and people get it wrong and/or succumb to dramatic and wrong science, that has always been true. The pressures in science might even be getting worse over time because it’s more crowded and most low-hanging fruit has been picked, so publishing is getting more difficult. (BTW if you haven’t seen BobbyBroccoli’s “The Rise of Jan Hendrik Schön” on YouTube, it’s fantastic and worth watching!)<p>Even that isn’t evidence of academics getting it wrong in this case, and it doesn’t compare in magnitude to how bad science reporting in the media is. Reporters don’t generally understand the science they report, they are under space and time constraints, and they have every incentive to drop subtlety and magnify drama. There’s not even a question about why science reporting is bad: because almost all reporting is bad for the same reason.<p>Academic Science isn’t crap Bill Clinton or Scripps says, it’s a process that assumes nothing is true and seeks truth by <i>testing</i>. There has been nothing better in human history, and nothing that has brought the world further faster, than science. Yes people sometimes corrupt it, because that’s what people do to everything, but the only choice we have is to keep on top of corrupting influences and keep doing science.
you should just assume that <i>any</i> reporting you see on almost any topic is at a minimum biased, if not a complete fabrication by either an individual with a personal agenda or else by whomever is paying for the reporting.<p>It is a sad state of affairs, but it is the world we live in now...and I have no solution to offer.
Reaction: Is non-science reporting much better these days? If "not really" - then the problem is upstream, and you should trace it back...<p>...assuming that you care about fixing it. Or just about your readers really understanding the problem.<p>Otherwise, you can write stories about how the patient's blood oxygen reads low in this finger, and that finger, and this other finger, and the left thumb, and the right big toe, and... That'll add up to a whole lot more clicks.
I have no problem assigning blame to both media outlets and research institutions. I'd also add news consumers, on whose gormless credulity all this depends. We're just getting the journalism we keep proving we want.
A lot o today's journalistic content should more properly be tagged as covert advertising. To facilitate this, media editors have hired science beat reporters with apparently very little science background - and their job is to repeat what the designated experts - the ones the editors have assigned them to interview - more or less verbatim. They don't want reporters asking the experts probing questions of any kind, that's not in the job description, and the reporters don't even know what kinds of questions to ask.<p>This behavior is most common in the pharmaceutical/medical device sector, and IIRC that's also the top revenue stream for most advertising-based businesses, hence the pressure to generate 'news stories' that serve the interests of the advertisers (or the owners of the media platform, who may have investments in other areas they want to promote). A good recent example is the hype effort surround the weight-loss drug Ozempic, but it's been a pattern of behavior for some decades now, although I imagine social media platforms are currently getting a large fraction of the outlay:<p><a href="https://www.statnews.com/2015/12/11/untold-story-tvs-first-prescription-drug-ad/" rel="nofollow">https://www.statnews.com/2015/12/11/untold-story-tvs-first-p...</a><p>> "The industry had won. Spending on all direct-to-consumer advertising ballooned from $360 million in 1995 to $1.3 billion in 1998. By 2006, it hit $5 billion, and most of that was on television commercials."
One way to push this to get better is to give positive feedback when you do see good reporting!<p>"Wow, this news article about an energy storage system correctly reported megawatts and megawatt hours, it's in the top 5% already, I'll send the newspaper positive feedback"
The amount of intentional "bad" reports is disturbing. They repeatedly bring back the same talking heads who have repeatedly been proved to be wrong to continue to tell obvious lies. The press might read a paper and very intentionally make stuff up that the paper nor the authors talk about at all.<p>The more you know about a topic the more glaring errors you find in the articles. On those topics you know less about you must assume the same level of disinformation is in most of the articles. So much of news ought to be in the fiction section.
My assessment is that it is because the science itself has devolved quite a bit. I'm just a greybeard sysadmin type who happened to be taught by a world-class geneticist how to read papers and turn them into implemented solutions, (I managed the data flow of every major sequencer type, we had at least one of each) during the sequencing boom in 2013. So that is the caveat to take my non-phd view with a grain of salt, but:<p>He showed me how researchers were padding their publication resumes in various ways, often with really bad research, which we considered anything that wasn't reproducible. The journals have too much corruption and money sloshing around and are no longer a very good indicator, and one really has to do the work of meta-analysis themselves was my takeaway. The number one indicator to me of this for a researcher is when they talk about how many times they've been published, one of the metrics that they pad the most.<p>Reproducibility is what actual good science looks like, and if I were a billionaire I would invest heavily in a journal that only published things they could reproduce.<p>If the science itself is that bad, how can we expect the science news peeps to be any better? Upstream cause-and-effect.