'At its most harmful it could damage health by stopping people taking the benefit of helpful medical interventions.'

Suzanne Elvidge summarises her talk about science and the media at the 2008 Greenbelt festival

My talk looked at the science (and pseudoscience) in the media and how to read it.

Pseudoscience is defined in Wikipedia as “a body of knowledge, methodology, belief, or practice that is claimed to be scientific or made to appear scientific, but does not adhere to the scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, or otherwise lacks scientific status.”

Pseudoscience stories in the press range from matter orientation system machines to find people from traces of their DNA to QLink pendants to help your body deal with poor nutrition, pollutants, stress and electrical currents

Pseudoscience seems to be attractive to the media because it is easily available and appears to provide straightforward solutions to difficult problems without any side effects.

At its least harmful I believe it’s a is waste of time and money, and at its most harmful it could damage health by stopping people taking the benefit of helpful medical interventions.

Why?

It’s important to have good science in the media because it helps us all understand science, which, like it or not, is an important part of everyday life, and makes it less confusing and mysterious.

It can neutralise myths and stereotypes and enthuse a new generation of budding scientists.

And even if you are not interested in science, knowing how to read science stories can help you read other stories such as politics, religion, business and economics.

What happens to science in the media?

Stories get mixed up for a variety of reasons – perhaps the journalist is not a specialist and so doesn’t understand the science, or has confused science and pseudoscience, or perhaps the scientist isn’t very good at explaining complex ideas to a non-scientific audience.

But if the science in the media is distorted, intentionally or unintentionally, do we just discard it all?

We can still get sense out of it by asking six important sets of questions: Who? Where? When? Why? How? What?

Who

Start off by looking at who has written the story. Is it a staff journalist, a science writer, or a ‘name’ – someone who is known in a particular field other than science, perhaps as a writer, a business person or a pseudoscientist.

A staff writer is likely to be a non-specialist, with no scientific or medical training, will probably source stories from press releases, or write from personal experience, and may also use the article to put across his or her own personal agenda.

Science writers are generally specialists with some level of scientific or medical training.

They will usually write under their own name (byline) and are most likely to write credible science, though they may still have an agenda as a sceptic.

Good science writers on pseudoscience include Ben Goldacre and David Colquhoun, and good science and medical writers include Roger Highfield, Pallab Ghosh, Graham Easton and Ian Sample.

Stories by ‘names’ are usually bylined, and may have a limited range of sources.

Reading this kind of article it’s easy to get distracted by the name - if she/he is successful as an author/sportsperson/business executive (delete as applicable), then they must know about this subject by extension, and not notice that it might include pseudoscience or misinterpreted science, or just be anecdote (i.e. only based on the experience of one person).

Where

It’s important to look at where the story about science is published – if it’s in newspaper or magazine, is it known for publishing science? If it’s on a website, have you heard of it before and who is behind it – it could be sponsored by a company or lobby group. If so, the information may be still valid but you are forewarned of any agendas.

When

It’s worth checking through a story to see if you can tell how old the research is (it might be out of date) or how long the study was (if the study isn’t long enough, the results might not be valid).

It might be hard to tell from the story, but you could try to find other versions in other newspapers or websites.

Why

Stories in the press do get distorted, and this might be for a number of reasons. It could be accidental, because the journalist didn’t understand the science, or because the scientist didn’t explain it very well, or intentional, to make the story more exciting, or to support a hidden agenda (perhaps to sell a product).

What

What are the statistics behind the story? Statistics aren’t as complicated as they sound, and will give some clues about the results behind the story.

The sample size is very important – a study with only a few participants tells us a lot less than one with many participants, and can be confusing as things that occur by chance will show up more.

This is why anecdotes are so misleading, as they have a sample size of one, and only tell us about what has happened to that one person.

A lot of stories talk about averages, but it’s worth remembering that there are three different kinds – mean, median and mode.

The mean is the arithmetic average (so when you add the ages of four people together and divide by four you have the arithmetic average of their ages), the median is the mid-point, where half the ages are above and half are below, and the mode is the most common, so the most common age in your group.

These three can give wildly different results, but all be described as ‘the average,’ and can be used to make data look better or worse.

Graphs and figures can make stories clearer, but they can also hide the data too – if the axes of graphs (the lines at the bottom and the left of the graph) have had the lower numbers missed out, it can make the data clearer, but it can also make differences look bigger.

Stories can also just miss some numbers out, perhaps making something out to be a big study when it actually only involved a few people. So – when you look at statistics in a story, remember it’s ‘reader beware’.

How

The last question. How was the study conducted – did it have any controls? These are people who are either untreated or who are given a placebo (a dummy treatment) - without these, there is no way to easily assess whether the treatment has any effect.

In conclusion

Every good scientific paper has to have a conclusion. Ours are actually quite brief.

Science and medicine in the media can be distorted, and the potential impact of this is that these distortions could stop scientists talking to the media, which would mean even less information on good science available to the public.

Added to this, the rise of pseudoscience could further tarnish the image of science.

To make sure you get the best view of science as a reader, there are a number of things you can do.

On top of all the questions I have given you to ask, it may be useful to read the story from a number of different publications, both online and print, including in specialist and non-specialist outlets.

And two final questions to apply – does it make sense, is it too good (or bad) to be true, and is it science or pseudoscience?

Reading between the lines is important – science in the media is a good thing, but not all media science is good.

Suzanne Elvidge is a freelance writer and editor and Surefish Ethical Living Editor

Further reading

• How to Lie with Statistics

• How to read a paper

• Bad Science (the book)

• Bad Science (the blog)

• The Quackometer

• Improbable Science

• Sense About Science

• Back to Greenbelt index