How to Fix Science Journalism

Michele Bachmann isn't the only one who tells wild tales about science, writes Fiona Fox in the New Scientist, so do the people who cover it. Science is frequently grossly distorted by the media's news values, including "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." Most science isn't that controversial, and sensational reporting would be curbed if every story had to focus on a study's sample size and put it a research context.