HACKS: SHODDY PRESS COVERAGE OF SCIENCE.

Destaque à coluna semanal "What's New" de Robert Park:

"The Leveson Inquiry into the standards and ethics of the UK press, headed by Lord Justice Brian Leveson, was prompted by the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. The seamy British tabloid was the top-selling English-language newspaper in the world when owner Rupert Murdoch had to close it five months ago after its news-collection methods were exposed. The intense public interest in the sex and drug culture of celebrities is certainly troubling, but the same journalistic standards applied to science news may be more dangerous. In 1998, for example, Andrew Wakefield, an obscure British gastroenterologist, set off a worldwide vaccination panic when he falsely identified the common MMR vaccination as a cause of autism. Widely reported by the press, Wakefield's irresponsible assertion led to a precipitous decline in vaccination rate and a corresponding 14-year rise in measles cases. An editorial in the current issue of Nature (8 Dec 2011) urges scientists to "fight back against agenda-driven reporting of science." Who could disagree? It is, after all, a fight against ignorance."

Robert Park