Journalists, commentators join TV humorist John Oliver in condemning bad science reporting

On the 8 May telecast of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, satirist John Oliver enthusiastically attacked shoddy, misleading science reporting. Highly energized media support quickly ensued. Oliver’s main target was TV. Online as of 12 May, his 20-minute video essay had drawn well more than 4.3 million views.

Whether journalists, editors, and producers are listening remains a separate question. Also open is whether science itself can or will capitalize on the incident. Not in question, though, is the adamancy of the media support, as seen in headlines like these:

• “John Oliver exposes how the media turns scientific studies into ‘morning show gossip’” (Vox )
• “Watch John Oliver dismantle the stupid way the media covers every scientific study” (Mother Jones )
• “John Oliver explains why so much ‘science’ you read about is bogus” (Washington Post‘s blog Speaking of Science )

New York Magazine proclaimed “John Oliver took on junk science on Last Week Tonight, and it was great.” Fortune called Oliver’s essay “the mother of all scientific mockeries,” a “trash-talking civics lesson” about the “comedy of errors” in which scientific papers get “blown out of proportion by a revved-up news cycle that thrives on out-of-context and unconfirmed breakthroughs of limited scientific merit.” That article observed:

Some of the punditry about Oliver’s attack has come from scientist pundits. Ars Technica‘s senior science editor John Timmer , a PhD biologist and former researcher at Cornell Medical College and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, advised in a headline that “John Oliver’s rant about science reporting should be taken seriously: Business decisions, institutional pressures, and scientists themselves share blame.”

Astronomy PhD Phil Plait contributes Slate‘s blog Bad Astronomy and calls himself a science evangelizer “who stands at the gate between science research and public consumption of that research.” In his posting “When science reporting goes horribly, horribly wrong,” Plait cited time 13:02 from Oliver’s video and wrote:

Oliver’s 20-minute essay begins with a series of TV news excerpts showing announcers reporting “a new study” about sugar and cancer, “a new study” about snacking and memory, “a new study” about pizza’s addictiveness, and “a new study” about hugging your dog. Then comes “a new study showing that drinking a glass of red wine is just as good as spending an hour at the gym.” Oliver exclaims, “What?” As cheers rise from the studio audience, he continues: “No! No! No! That last one doesn’t even sound like science. It’s more like something your sassy aunt would wear on her T-shirt.”

“The point is,” Oliver says after citing and mocking more examples, “there are now so many studies being thrown around they can seem to contradict one another. In just the last few months, we’ve seen studies about coffee that claim it may reverse the effects of liver damage, help prevent colon cancer, decrease the risk of endometrial cancer and increase the risk of miscarriage. Coffee today is like God in the Old Testament: It will either save you or kill you depending on how much you believe in its magic powers.”

Oliver lobbed special mockery at the TED talk “Trust, morality—and oxytocin?” The talk appears online with this introductory blurb: “What drives our desire to behave morally? Neuroeconomist Paul Zak shows why he believes oxytocin (he calls it ‘the moral molecule’) is responsible for trust, empathy and other feelings that help build a stable society.” Beneath the blurb appears this speaker ID: “A pioneer in the field of neuroeconomics, Paul Zak is uncovering how the hormone oxytocin promotes trust, and proving that love is good for business.”

As “Dr. Love,” Zak prescribes eight hugs per day. His video clip has had more than 1.4 million views. Oliver reports expert scientific skepticism about the matter, then offers—in fact exclaims—a prescription of his own: “When a stranger calling himself ‘Dr. Love’ offers to hug you eight times a day, say no!” Soon in his video, satirist Oliver introduces what he calls TODD talks—"Trends, Observations and Dangerous Drivel, where the format of TED talks meets the intellectual rigor of morning news shows.”

Oliver’s viewers know his style is to range widely around his topic, deliberately tossing in silly extraneous stuff, but that he is at the same time plenty serious. Coincidentally this week, an unrelated Nature commentary presses one of his themes, the sometimes counterproductive pressure on scientists to publish. Oliver also addresses other failings specifically by scientific organizations or scientists:

• Press releases that inflate, overly dramatize, or downright misrepresent limited scientific findings.
• Questionable, and worse, handling or manipulation of statistics.
• The unfortunate infrequency of replication studies.

He also addresses journalists’ failings:

• Credulous, uncritical use of press releases.
• The habit of continually presenting narrow results as revolutionary.
• Dumbing-down that becomes way too dumb.
• Inattention, often effectively deliberate, to complicating or limiting factors.
• Lack of science knowledge.
• Distortion, sometimes gross, of scientists’ actual conclusions.
• The scanting of variations in the human applicability of findings derived from animals.
• The naive or irresponsible presentation of discredited studies.
• Inattention to the problem of conflict of interest.

Oliver declares, “Science is, by its nature, imperfect, but it is hugely important. And it deserves better than to be twisted out of proportion and turned into morning-show gossip. So if they are going to keep saying ‘a study says,’ they should have to provide sourcing and context, or not mention it at all.”

At Ars Technica, Timmer ended his piece with this: “For many topics—evolution, vaccine safety, climate change—the evidence is comprehensive and extremely internally consistent. If we want people to accept those conclusions, we can’t be feeding them a constant stream of stories that indicate the process that brought us to them produces unreliable nonsense. Unfortunately, we continue to do exactly that.”

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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.