wandering stars

A lot of the media coverage on the topic was highly sensationalised, and considerable misinformation.swirled around both bird flu and the implications of the research. This is getting increasingly common in science journalism, in no small part because people who are not trained in the sciences are reporting on them. Imperfect or fundamentally wrong understanding of science leads to stories that are grossly misstated, and editors who aren’t familiar with the subject either may not catch the problems, or may not know how to correct them. The result is that a highly virulent story is released into the world, and since readers aren’t sufficiently inoculated with their own scientific knowledge, they panic.