Surely they should be comparing like with like – the woman who had the abortion did not have a full-term baby. Otherwise you have two factors instead of one: a) having an abortion b) having a full-term pregnancy

They should instead perhaps compare with someone who had a miscarriage at the same (st)age.

Or, the study you propose should include miscarriages as well as abortions.

Then they would be doing their jobs properly.

I’ve been on both sides of a press release. What’s included in the press release is usually technically accurate, but what’s left out is often much more important. The level of “honesty” is often the level that you get from asking a young boy whether he got his clothes muddy.

The boy might look at the mud caked on his shoes, the filth on his hands, and the streaks in his hair, but note that from collar to socks there’s not a speck of mud, and “honestly” tell you that he didn’t get any mud on his clothes.

If I were writing for a pro-PSA group, I’d never tell you that you have to screen 1400 men to save one life. I’d never tell you that saving one life requires putting 47 other men through useless treatment. You might not make the “right” choice if I did that.

It’s not just prostate cancer; we could use any number of examples:

If I were writing for a pro-HIV testing center, I’d never tell you that testing people (in the developed world) with no identifiable risk factors (e.g., no anal sex) is going to produce an enormous proportion of false positives.

If I were writing for a pro-choice group, I’d never tell you that the reason abortion isn’t associated with breast cancer is because they compare the risk of a woman that has an early abortion at age 20 and her sole full-term pregnancy at age 30 to a woman that never got pregnant until she was 30 — instead of to a woman that had two children, the first at age 20 and the second at age 30. We all know that “age at first full-term pregnancy” and “number of children” have a significant impact on breast cancer risk, but they set up the studies to compare the risk to someone that never got pregnant in the first place, instead of comparing it to a woman who got pregnant and gave birth instead of getting an abortion (i.e., the two actual choices facing the woman in question, given that time travel has not yet been perfected).

Similarly, I’d never tell you that young women who refuse abortions typically do better in life (including income, education, housing, staying out of criminal justice, and more) than the ones that have an abortion. The facts are real, and every person whose grandfather said, “I realized when your uncle was born, in the bad old pre-abortion days, that I needed to grow up in a hurry” knows that it’s not entirely a matter of already-successful women choosing to give birth while losers get abortions.

If I were writing for a Chronic Fatigue Syndrome charity, I’d never tell you that 90%+ of CFS patients actually have undiagnosed orthostatic hypotension. Who wants to give up 90%+ of their support base?!? Most “CFS” patients need a tilt-table test and three litres of water every day, not a poor-mysterious-us group, but you won’t get that information from the charity.

All rare diseases are underdiagnosed — if you believe the press releases.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. It’s irresponsible to trust in the completeness of a press release. It’s unprofessional to assume that the press release is the best method of presenting the information.

“It may not be desirable that journalists have such ridiculously short deadlines (even shorter these days with online news, 24-broadcast news and shrinking incomes) but it is a fact. Newspapers could of course employ two or three times more journalists, but then readers would need to stump up five or six times more money each day to buy the newspaper.”

This is a straw man – you assume that research results must be reported as soon as possible. Why must they?

The scientific research being discussed takes months or years to carry out, and the results, when published, generally take weeks, months or years to filter into any kind of technology or policy that will actually have an effect our lives. Given this, there is no credible reason that I can think of for newspapers to report scientific research findings on the day that the relevant press release is issued.

Put it like this: if you were given the choice between reading a misleading, error-strewn science article on Monday and reading a meaningful, factually correct science article on Tuesday, which one would you choose?

You’re welcome to your preferences, but it’s a false comparison: many newspapers have gone and will presently be gone that were/are also energetic, vital, and popular.

Dry troubled newspaper or wet troubled newspaper, their ownership structure has tended to be share-based. So when a bunch of shareholding morons start panicking about the Internet and everything else stealing advertisers and readers away, their knee-jerk reaction is:

-To cut costs to boost (often already healthy, in the sense a privately-owned enterprise would be happy with them) margins, thereby screwing their quality in a way that is very obvious to readers and advertisers, who then move on, and kill the margins

-To dumb everything down, chasing what they believe is the lowest common denominator, who they think cares more about reading something entertaining than being informed, and who they nonetheless think advertisers are interested in reaching

But the problems start right away: this stereotype of the lowest-common-denominator reader isn’t going to be the sort of stereotype high-disposable income stereotype advertisers want to chase.

And even if they did, it’s obvious to anybody besides panic-stricken shareholding morons that there are a MILLION things more entertaining than an ‘entertaining’ newspaper. It’s just not the right format for lowest-common-denominator entertainment. Why go to all the trouble of READING pablum when you can watch just about any idiocy roll out on gossip sites, reality shows, scaremongering current affairs programmes with presenters with nice tits, etc.?

Is any news group more ‘entertaining’ and less concerned with dry facts than the Daily Mail group? They’ve just slashed the costs to hell; the only problem is they can’t dumb down anymore. Predictably enough, they’re losing ad revenue and will almost certainly lose a great deal more.

I don’t disagree with your explanation of why science reporting can get so crappy and homogenous, but I really doubt competing with celebrinews and murder splats is the best route forward for science reporting or other news reporting in the papers . . . either for the papers or the readers. The ‘lowest common denominator’ has better things to do than be condescended to in print, and the newspaper medium has too many other possibilities.

Perhaps a distinction needs to be made between “front page” scientific coverage and some sort of “science section” coverage. I wonder if the front page coverage of the economic crisis reflected the accuracy (if not the depth) of the financial pages of most papers? If the second aids the first then perhaps what we really need is hardcore scientific coverage in papers which will then pull up the socks of the flashy front page stuff.

Anyways, Bob Ward’s arguments piss me off. I write (and far, far more than one article a week) for a B2B concern and if I just copied out a press release without looking into it and adding detail I’d get slapped, and rightfully so. My readers pay about 700 pounds a year for this crap and they deserve value. I don’t think Ward would argue with that.

So his position annoys me, because while I doubt anyone would argue I shouldn’t do background checking into the releases that cross my desk for my kajillion articles a week because people pay so much for what I write, he seems to be arguing that the public, who pay much less than 700 pounds a year for their news, don’t deserve value – that the system of journalists regurgitating press releases for pop markets is a functional way for things to work because it gets the most information out the fastest.

The information angle is nonsense, obviously. Press releases aren’t information, they’re ads. That’s their job. That should be obvious to the meanest of intelligences – even to all the non-humanities grads out there.

But the suggestion that pop audiences don’t deserve the same checking into the material for lifestyle articles, especially the ones about health regimens, is what really gets my goat. They might not be paying however many hundreds of pounds a year but they’re certainly making the business in question however many hundreds of pounds a year. It’s exploitative and gross.

Oh, and it’s not that damn hard to check a damn press release. It really isn’t. You call the contact people, you look at the company or organization, you have a few quick searches to see if anything else is being done along the same lines somewhere else or by someone else; I mean, the whole damn thing takes 45 minutes at the topmost. Stop being such a big bunch of sucks. Stop playing solitaire or dropping overly-long comments like this one on Bad Science and pick up the damn phone. Damn it.

Surely journalists should (in theory) be doing something more than regurgitating the press release. Otherwise why don’t newspapers just give us the press releases and fire the lot of you?

The fact that nurses work under a lot of pressure doesn’t give them free reign to neglect all their patients.

“Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. I can barely understand most of the sports section. In the literature pull-out, there are five-page-long essays which I find completely impenetrable, where the more Russian novelists you can rope in the cleverer everybody thinks you are. I do not complain about this: I envy it.”

The financial and literature review sections of broadsheet newspapers can be well over the head of most readers, the same expectations are not made of science.

Not sure whether we could ever expect them to rise to the challenge, but I guess we can encourage the media to seek appropriate consultants.

Not just because the full text of the ignored article is open access, as others have pointed out already, but more importantly because the abstract — which takes about 20 seconds to read — spells out the key point in no uncertain terms.

“Conclusions: After 7 to 10 years of follow-up, the rate of death from prostate cancer was very low and did not differ significantly between the two study groups.”

I don’t see how you could spoon-feed lazy journalists a message any more effectively than that!

I would imagine that these false positives would outweigh even the 47 who still die of the disease or, as is most often the case, die With the disease Of something completely different. I note the claimed figures that 35000 men a year are diagnosed with prostatic carcinoma, and “one an hour” (ie between 8 and 9000) die of it annually. Well, I know that very few of the rest are ever actually cured of the disease, which suggests that maybe around 25000 sufferers a year die of something else.

The Prostate Cancer Charity, from the press releases referenced, clearly believe that GPs are not taking the matter seriously (like many other single-issue health-related organisations seem to think, we should obviously be putting Their agenda higher than the agendas of every other issue, maybe).
Perhaps if they had had to deal with many years of patients being sent to us after some private medical with a marginally raised PSA, they might understand it better: “Ah, yes, we’ve done your prostate cancer test, and it is a bit high, aren’t you lucky you came our way? Now, be a good fellow and just pop along to your GP and get them to sort it all out for you.”
Thankfully, that seldom happens now, but there is no doubt that dealing with the fall-out from such thoughtless testing will tend to colour a GP’s view.

And the last time, admittedly before this latest round of research, that I went to a clinical debate on the subject, the Urologist arguing the case for screening freely admitted during the discussion afterwards that he was firmly anti other than for the sake of the meeting.

If academic institutions can provide full Pubmed access, then surely enormous multinational media conglomerates can pull it off too. As thepoisongarden points out, arts critics are expected to fully understand their medium. Sports journalists must understand the rules of most sports. If a science or health journalist cannot read the primary literature, he or she is in the wrong job.

And frankly, if journalists had to assume that all parts of a press release were wrong until proven otherwise, then it would defeat the object of using the release in the first place.

Sounds fair to me. Press releases have a largely toxic effect on journalism; seeing them treated with due scepticism strikes me as a win.

It’s a safe bet that anyone issuing a press release, even if technically honest, is going to be consciously or unconsciously slanting the information towards their particular viewpoint. Accepting a press release at face value is exactly as stupid as acccepting an advertisement at face value.

And why stop there? Why not assume that the journal papers are also wrong until verified by a second source?

There is a second source; it’s called peer review. It ain’t perfect, but it is usually good enough to catch blatant deception. And when even peer review fails, there’s still that handy “cited by” link on Google Scholar…