The remediation of science news

The overall goal of this project is to better understand how science news comes into being and circulates in today’s global mediascape. For most of us, the news media are our primary source of science- and health- related information. However, in the course of travelling from the lab to journalists, and eventually to the public, this information inevitably undergoes a complex series of transformations, some of which may significantly distort the accuracy of the message. Previous research has shown that journalists – and the science communicators vying to reach them – often overstate the importance of incremental discoveries, gloss over nuances, confuse correlation for causation, skirt fact-checking and cross-referencing due to limited time, and misconstrue the message due to lack of specialised expertise.This in turn can negatively impact the public’s perception and knowledge of scientific information, and stimulate manifestly unhealthy and even dangerous behaviours. All of this takes on a special urgency in the coronavirus era, as science news plays a central role in shaping the public’s views on health risk assessment (e.g. the importance of wearing a mask), treatment efficacy (e.g. the importance of getting vaccinated), and confidence in science-based public health policy more generally (e.g. the importance of ‘flattening the curve’).