Yes. It’s interesting that Dr Richard Smith recently deplored what he believes to be over-done excitement about a prostate cancer treament. He gave this insight into his own thought processes in such over-eager promotions:

Years ago I used to be the BBC Breakfast Time doctor, and I had to struggle every week with how to present the results of these sorts of studies to an audience only half awake. My conclusion was that I did much more harm by hyping treatments than I did by being over cautious – because new treatments famously go through phases of being “a major breakthrough” to being “terrible poison” to ending up as “a treatment of limited effectiveness that has some use in some patients”.

As several commenters point out, there seems to be a drive towards attracting reader attention at the expense of accuracy for readers.

It’s difficult for newspapers to make a decent call when they are shedding specialist journalists. A Healthy Distrust has an interesting piece of this topic: The biggish picture or why this blog exists.

I couldn’t agree more with fidelity to sources and an appropriate overview.

Written in the preface to “A history of Rome” by J.L. Myres in 1902.

If only the press and the likes of Holford would do the same in 2008.

PS: Re the media’s MMR hoax – I posted a little piece about the media’s role [here] and suggested Wakefield was being scapegoated and I was pointed to a piece by Anthony Cox [Black Triangle] and a piece by Ben Goldacre pointing out that 80% of MMR stories were written by ‘non-specialist’ journalists [here].

Admin Edit: we’ll put those links in an update. We knew that you had written some relevant items but the BSblogs search wasn’t cooperating and the only ones that we could find were jqh’s.

Don’t count on it, quote mining is their speciality