Why I don’t trust News Articles about Science.

This was a recent topic of conversation among my friends and I thought I might as well write my two cents here for it. As the title suggests, I do not trust news articles about science, specifically ones that says, “New study reveals “blank”. The reason being, I tend to see a lot of articles getting the science wrong.

Now, I just want to say I am not trying to sound pretentious at all. It’s just I remember there being a time where I would get the latest science news from the news. However, with further education, I started to see more and more errors in these articles.

Sometimes, the statements were flat wrong. Such as a misunderstanding of what certain things are. I remember one article just missing the mark on the concept of Glycolysis. However, I usually find the articles over exaggerating a study and not really looking at it critically. For example one article may have looked into a small protein in the body that may rise due to a particular food and some studies seem to say there is a slight connection between that protein and weight gain. With that, the news article may boldy claim, “new study reveals blank to cause weight gain”. It’s just not an accurate representation and actually worrisome because that is how misleading information can spread more and more. Every new research needs to be read critically with what the findings actually mean and the experimental setup to obtain those findings. If we all do that instead of just connecting A to B or making up that A is B, then maybe we wouldn’t see things like, “anti-vaccinations”. But that is just my two cents.