What If There Were Rules for Science Journalism?
The media were not solely responsible for the MMR scare, but some of the news values that caused the problem are alive and well: the appetite for a great scare story; the desire to overstate a claim made by one expert in a single small study; the reluctance to put one alarming piece of research into its wider, more revealing context; journalistic “balance”—which creates the impression of a significant divide in scientific opinion where there is none; the love of the maverick; and so on.
I don’t know if you’ve seen one of of the latest posts on Ethan Siegel’s blog, Starts with a bang, about his new adventure. He’s working on a kind of a quality scientific news aggregator, something that will gather science and evidence based, accurate news. And, if I understood correctly from his post, he wants to “teach” a software to sort out the good stuff from the ocean of clumsy, woo, biased or simply terrible media reports of scientific facts. It looks great. And fun.