P.S. Your remarks would carry more weight with me if you’d chosen an example of bollocks science from the Guardian or Telegraph rather than the Daily Mail.

The PCC in the UK should also act faster and have more influence to try and stamp out the mistakes and bad journalism when they occur. This link contains just one example (of many) failings that lead to bad stories being printed in the press.. and nothing being done about it – http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.com/2012/02/pcc-rules-on-complaints-about-hpv.html

I’ve dived in to the Guardian’s discussion about the topic, so won’t repeat myself here, save to say that I think a system of peer review for UK science journalism would be an excellent idea. It would encourage readers to become more demanding consumers of accurate science journalism, and motivate editors/ media shareholders to invest in it more. A number of such initiative exist in other countries, such as Health News Review in the US amd Medien Doktor in Germany.

Earlier, you said that journalists could not be held responsible for failure to detect cleverly masked fraud, and there is truth there. But stuff like the Daily Mail example is nothing of the kind. It’s not Marc Hauser or Diederik Stapel. It’s simple stuff that could be identified as exaggeration by anyone with a basic grounding in health reporting. It’s j-school stuff.

So in your example, I would expect a reporter to note whether J.Random Author had any evidence for their unicorn hypothesis, and to call them out for lack of said evidence if appropriate. Or better yet, ditch the story.

I mean, it’s fine to report that “J.Random Author told us ‘We believe invisible pink unicorns roam in the cosmos’ “, another thing is writing a story entitled “Scientists discover invisible pink unicorns”. Am I right?

In this case? Yes I would have expected the reporter to question the frankly dubious assertion in the quote. This ain’t quantum physics. It’s a simple epidemiological study and the ground rules for analysing these (a) aren’t hard and (b) have been laid out by folks like Gary Schweitzer FOR YEARS. Even if the scientist was quoted accurately, so what? They screwed up. And in running the quote, so did the reporter. Accountability is not a zero-sum game.

What you’re saying – that reporters should simply trust everything that’s said to them – is a recipe for disaster. And it’s not journalism; it’s stenography. If anyone actually follows it, they might as well dispense with the science section of their publication and run the RSS feed from Eurekalert.

The problem with these discussions is not that the problem has been misdiagnosed. It’s that the problem has been identified, but that some reporters have such a warped view of the basic elements of their job that they refuse to be held accountable for their role in screw-ups. And maybe, just maybe, the entire industry would benefit if we cowboyed up and held ourselves to loftier standards, rather than playing a frankly unsavoury game of blame distribution when someone correctly points out a flaw in out work.

I think the fundamental flaw with these discussions is often a misdiagnosis of the problem. There should be more consideration of how researchers and their press officers are the root of many examples of bad reporting.

On top of that, though, I’d say it’s press officers’ responsibility to make sure scientists *do* check for errors, exaggerations, or missing limitations. There’s sometimes a temptation to think “the scientists didn’t comment, so it must be OK (and I can move on to my next task)”, or to get exasperated by a re-written text and view every requested change as an attempt to insert more jargon. As press officers, it’s our job to weed through responses and work out – with the scientists – if and where there are inaccuracies, misrepresentations, exaggerations, etc. Or ideally, to gauge and anticipate some of those issues before even drafting the text – by talking to the scientists and understanding not just what they say but how they say it.