Popular Media Sucks At Science

[gcomeau]

From my recent blog posting on the subject ( http://duelingdogma.blogspot.com/2010/04/popular-media-sucks-at-science.html ) inspired by some nonsense that recently appeared on the Religion and Theology forum.

...
This is where we run into problems... because journalists have a tendency not to just want to clarify when they report on science. Clarifying is boring, and it doesn't attract many readers. No... they want to dress things up and make them exciting too. So they start exercising a bit of what they call "artistic license" in their presentation of the story. Which is how we get from the previous technical discussion of how individual DNA molecules can act on each other across a few nanometers of space through electrostatic effects and whatnot... to this:

DNA Molecules Display Telepathy-like Quality

...which inspires in me the urge to bang my head against a wall. Repeatedly.

Now, if you click on that link the rest of that article actually did a relatively good job of explaining that they were really talking about probable electrostatic effects between molecules over tiny tiny distances and that the "telepathy" was nothing of the kind and no weird supernatural things were happening... but when you're throwing up a headline like that you're asking for trouble.

If only that was all we had to deal with...

[paulsby]

1. popular media sucks at EVERYTHING

why should science be exempt?

[gcomeau]

2. True...

...but IMO, they especially suck at science.

[paulsby]

3. ime

anytime one learns a lot about a subject, one cannot read any media accounts of same without throwing up a little

the more you know about a subject, the more obvious it is that the media is very bad at reporting on it

paulsby's law (tm)