As if to affirm my assertions in this entry, The Guardian is carrying a story on why most science reporting are rubbish, which also included the very informational link to BadScience. To summarize: the badness of scientific reporting lies in three parts--the assumption that the readers are stupid, the lack of direct references, and the tendency to exaggerate.

The first is one of the most deadliest of assaults on the general intelligence of the human race. The continuing dumbing down of science will not help to educate the masses. On the contrary, it will make them become ill informed and further distances them from the scientific researchers. The comparison in the article is made toward book reviews or financial articles, where reporters have no fear of throwing jargon around. But when it comes to science articles, reporters start assuming them must write it in a way that three-year-olds can understand.

The second, the lack of citation, only exacerbates the problem. Many a science article in newspapers present the findings as straight-up facts in the same way the Bible presents the history of the Jews as straight-up facts: straight-up from the mouth of God. With no citations, even those readers who intend to further their understanding of the issue, and are not satisfied with the lackluster reporting in the article, will not know where to look for references. In short, the newspapers are deliberate in putting up a barrier to readers understanding the article.

Lastly, the tendency to exaggeration, or sensationalism, is an obvious effect of the greed of news organizations. In an effort to sell more copies, they resort to generalizing studies to cases that weren't included in the studies, or presenting a collection of minor case reports as a universal truism, or excerpting from research papers only the sections that fit with their agenda.