I just read an interesting article over in the Guardian by Ben Goldacre, who writes their Bad Science column, entitled Don’t Dumb Me Down. (I’ve no idea how I’ve managed to miss the Bad Science column until now, as I read the Guardian… maybe it’s only in the weekday editions that I rarely buy, or possibly it’s far enough back in the paper that I’ve lost interest by that point. If you’re interested there’s an archive of his articles over at badscience.net, which also has this wonderful bio:

Ben studied Medicine at Magdalen College Oxford where he also edited Isis, the Oxford University Magazine. He left in 1995 with a First: before going on to clinical medicine at UCL, he was a visiting researcher in cognitive neurosciences at the University of Milan, working on fMRI brain scans of language and executive function, and was also funded by the British Academy to do a Masters degree in Philosophy at King’s. He is, as you can see, a serious fuck-off academic ninja.

Anyway, back to the point.) The article sorts bad science reporting into three categories, wacky, scares and “breakthrough” stories, then makes the point that it is the simplistic way in which science news is reported that is really at fault.

Because papers think you won’t understand the “science bit”, all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them – that is, the people who know a bit about science. Compare this with the book review section, in any newspaper. The more obscure references to Russian novelists and French philosophers you can bang in, the better writer everyone thinks you are. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. Imagine the fuss if I tried to stick the word “biophoton” on a science page without explaining what it meant. I can tell you, it would never get past the subs or the section editor. But use it on a complementary medicine page, incorrectly, and it sails through.

I’d say it’s a bit of an unfair comparison; an exciting science breakthrough is actually news and so is expected to be read by a wider audience than a book review, which is usually only looked at by someone who’s interested. The dumbing down of science reporting is obvious and I even caught it in action recently. I can’t remember the exact scare story, but I believe it was some work showing a link between leukaemia and living near powerlines. On Radio 4 it was reported as being based on a very small sample set and the actual risk being very very small indeed, and that these two points were clearly made in the paper. By the time it made it to Radio 1, all these caveats had been lost. The main reason for this kind of thing happening is perhaps a more general problem with the media, in that they’ve realised that to sell papers/advertising time they must entertain or shock their audience. Well reasoned, balanced, arguments, which most science consists of, isn’t exciting. Cf the political media in America; fat obnoxious opinionated people make better entertainment than anyone trying to see both sides of an argument and admit that no answer can be completely correct.