By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ben Goldacre: Don't Dumb Me Down, The Guardian September 13, 2005
The author characterizes three types of bad science writing in traditional media: wacky stories, scare stories and breakthrough stories. He should have added a fourth, in my view: commercial messages disguised as science stories. According to this article, the proliferation of bad scientific writing is a result of the resistance from descendents of the Romantic movement, people who feel "everything in science is tenuous, contradictory and, most ridiculously, 'hard to understand'." And it is these same people who are responsible for writing, editing and approving copy. More...