Well journalists, in general, don't give a lot of space to flat earthers, holocaust deniers or even rich department store owners who think the Duke of Edinburgh connived with the Secret Service to murder Princess Diana. So there is a level at which they bring professional judgment to bear on the underlying likelihood of the position being put forward so I'd sort of hope, at least naively, that a better grounding in medical evidence would help them select their stories.
Similarly a better grounding would allow them to ask more searching questions. I don't know if you came across the Toads leaving Aquila story (some toads that were being studied near Aqulia vanished in the days preceding the Earthquake). It was mentioned on the Today programme and John Humphrys is quite intelligent enough and sufficiently unafraid of putting interviewees on the spot, to make the points that correlation does not imply causation, and that you are on dodgy ground drawing strong conclusions from noticing something after the fact that you weren't initially looking for - fairly basic points which wider basic scientific literacy would sort of require a journalist to make (if that makes sense). In this case the scientist involved has done nothing more than say that there needs to be more work, I hasten to add, which is precisely what Wakefield should have done, instead he chose to make medical recommendations for alternative forms of vaccine and so on and so forth.
I think also, since at some level we always have to invoke authority figures, I'd expect journalists to shine the same sort of light onto the false claims, and networks of complicity that can exist in "science" as they do to politicians. Again wider scientific literacy would have made a paper blush to claim that a man who had gained a PhD via a correspondance course with one of America's dodgier universities and who was operating out of his garden shed was the UK's foremost expert on MRSA. As it stands that kind of understanding that not all PhD's are equal and not all "labs" (to be generous) work to the same standards is sufficiently lacking in the public consciousness that it doesn't appear to occur to journalists to check that kind of thing.
no subject
Similarly a better grounding would allow them to ask more searching questions. I don't know if you came across the Toads leaving Aquila story (some toads that were being studied near Aqulia vanished in the days preceding the Earthquake). It was mentioned on the Today programme and John Humphrys is quite intelligent enough and sufficiently unafraid of putting interviewees on the spot, to make the points that correlation does not imply causation, and that you are on dodgy ground drawing strong conclusions from noticing something after the fact that you weren't initially looking for - fairly basic points which wider basic scientific literacy would sort of require a journalist to make (if that makes sense). In this case the scientist involved has done nothing more than say that there needs to be more work, I hasten to add, which is precisely what Wakefield should have done, instead he chose to make medical recommendations for alternative forms of vaccine and so on and so forth.
I think also, since at some level we always have to invoke authority figures, I'd expect journalists to shine the same sort of light onto the false claims, and networks of complicity that can exist in "science" as they do to politicians. Again wider scientific literacy would have made a paper blush to claim that a man who had gained a PhD via a correspondance course with one of America's dodgier universities and who was operating out of his garden shed was the UK's foremost expert on MRSA. As it stands that kind of understanding that not all PhD's are equal and not all "labs" (to be generous) work to the same standards is sufficiently lacking in the public consciousness that it doesn't appear to occur to journalists to check that kind of thing.