Dodgy academic PR

May 30th, 2009 by Ben Goldacre in academic pr, bad science, media, pr guff | 24 Comments »

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian
Saturday 30 May 2009

Obviously we distrust the media on science: they rewrite commercial press releases from dodgy organisations as if they were health news, they lionise mavericks with poor evidence, and worse. But journalists will often say: what about those scientists with their press releases? Surely we should do something about them, running about, confusing us with their wild ideas? Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve come across a sticky patch. We’re going to have to work through it, or get out and go our separate ways.

March 7th, 2009 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, pr guff, scienciness | 44 Comments »

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian,
Saturday 7 March 2009

A truly groundbreaking document has been leaked onto the internet. The claim is that this 27-page wonder represents a successful $1.5m pitch to make a slight modification to the Pepsi logo. Welcome to the science of PR. Read the rest of this entry »

Mischief PR and more top secret data.

July 5th, 2008 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, pr guff, scare stories, secret data, statistics, survey data | 39 Comments »

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian
Saturday July 5 2008

Anyone would think the cold war was still on, with all this top secret scientific data that journalists constantly seem to be writing about. In last week’s column, as you will remember, we saw the Sunday Express front page claiming that a scientist and government adviser called Dr Coghill had performed scientific research, and found that the Bridgend suicide cases all lived closer to a mobile phone mast than average: this was an issue of great public health significance, but when I contacted the researcher, he wasn’t a doctor, he wasn’t really a government adviser, he couldn’t tell me what he meant by “average”, and he had, in a twist of almost incomprehensible ridiculousness, “lost” the data.

This week we have the same thing, from the insurance company Esure, and their agents Mischief PR. Read the rest of this entry »