Most science “news” is just regurgitated press releases
Did you know that the most-visited source of science news on the internet, Science Daily, is basically 100% unedited press releases?
It’s a great business model: no reporting costs, but plenty of free traffic - just check out how often Science Daily “stories” make it to the front page of Digg.
Should we be surprised, then, that a recent survey by the Columbia Journalism Review has discovered an unfortunate trend — that more and more science “reporting” at mainstream outlets is in fact uncritical regurgitation of press releases?
“The trend is that more and more media use press releases not just as fodder but as the source of whole explanatory segments and quotes in their stories,” said Dennis Meredith, the former head of Duke University’s science press office. He, too, has seen a number of reporters lift quotes directly from press releases and plug them into stories without attribution, a practice he called “absolutely unethical.”
Unethical or no, this is simply market forces at work. Bad money drives out good, as they say, and as long as press releases are good enough for the public, their influence will only increase.
It’s a shame when you consider that headline-grabbing findings are often the most likely to turn out wrong.
(Not to mention the fact that while these press releases are deliberately written to sound like news stories, they are not in any sense ‘balanced,’ having been produced by PR flacks for the research institutions who put them out.)
Update:
The situation is so bad even gawker noticed.
