Dr. Ben Goldacre publishes a weekly column called "Bad Science" in The Daily Wanker The Guardian that is actually one of the few redeeming features of said paper. (The collection is also available on badscience.net, Ben's weblog.)
Today's entry is entitled "Don't dumb me down". Its moneygraf:
There is one university PR department in London that I know fairly well - it’s a small middle-class world after all - and I know that until recently, they had never employed a single science graduate. This is not uncommon. Science is done by scientists, who write it up. Then a press release is written by a non-scientist, who runs it by their non-scientist boss, who then sends it to journalists without a science education who try to convey difficult new ideas to an audience of either lay people, or more likely - since they’ll be the ones interested in reading the stuff - people who know their way around a t-test a lot better than any of these intermediaries. Finally, it’s edited by a whole team of people who don’t understand it. You can be sure that at least one person in any given "science communication" chain is just juggling words about on a page, without having the first clue what they mean, pretending they’ve got a proper job, their pens all lined up neatly on the desk.Of course a system like that will cock up.
Tell me about it, mate ;-) Go read the whole thing, and have a look at some of the other articles while you're at it.
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