Excellent point. I suspect that most organizations do not bother to have a specialist reporter in the sciences. I also suspect that being a good reporter and asking for clarification is too much trouble for many journalists with deadlines.

I stand corrected. I should have been more careful about writing in a way that generalized all journalists. I respect the journalists at some technical news sources, such as Aviation Week and Space News (among others), and I respect some interviewers, such as John Batchelor, for knowing enough of the topic to know what questions to ask.

To paraphrase a phrase: you comment and you learn.

I will put that morning drive-time crew in the category of “good reporters,” because they bothered to call the scientist and ask the questions. Unfortunately, the noon and afternoon news crews did not even bother to find out what should have been common knowledge at the radio station.

If you are a good science reporter, you learn the jargon and can understand the papers. And if there is something in the paper you don’t understand that appears important, you call the scientists up and ask them about it. I have been doing this routinely now for more than 20 years, since I switched from filmmaking to science journalism in 1994.

The most important part however is to read the scientific paper. Sadly, too many journalists don’t do this, even though it is a prerequisite for doing their job right.

A couple of decades ago, the morning drive-time crew on a radio station that I used to listen to gushed over a new study that they thought said that lots and lots of sex is good for you. An hour into the show, they got one of the authors on the phone to ask him about it, and he said that the study showed that sex was good in one specific area of health, and should not be taken as meaning that we all should have lots of sex. The morning crew toned down their report on the subject.

The noon news crew and the afternoon drive-time crew obviously didn’t ever listen to the station’s morning show, because they were gushing about how that same study said that lots and lots of sex is good for you.

Good science badly reported.

It is clear to me that journalists don’t bother to read science papers. But would they know what they are reading if they did read them? Scientific papers tend to be written in scientist-ese, a boring language with a lot of terms and phrases that look like English but need translation.

Not understanding the language and practice of science is one of the reasons why everyone uses the word “theory” when they refer to a hypothesis, an uneducated guess, or a political position.