Think the 'chocolate as miracle food' hoax was something new?

In 2007 we carried an article spoofing how ridiculous the chocolate science hype was - AAAS had just carried a whole panel on the miracle of chocolate, and all but one of the participants was funded by a chocolate company, so they clearly were writing checks because they liked what those researchers had already done. But if we focus too much on one thing, like exploiting gullible media with cosmic claims about a miracle food, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that there are a number of health recommendations, and even science policy issues, that get made using junk science claims - and no one is revealing at the end it is a hoax.

Part of it has to be intentional on the part of unethical researchers, who are desperate to allege natural gas extraction is polluting groundwater, that GMO foods cause tumors, or that vaccines cause autism. Yet politicians aren't going to be able to tell the difference, and they have a staff of folks reading these things, so how will the public know what is really significant versus what is statistically significant.
 
"If you measure a large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost guaranteed to get a 'statistically significant' result," says Dr. John Bohannon, a molecular biologist and the mastermind of the experiment showing that crazy health claims can get their way into Daily Mail and Huffington Post and certainly magazines like Shape and Prevention.

Writing in the Washington Examiner, T. Becket Adams tackles the Bohannon chocolate hoax and notes that Bohannon did it for a solid reason - his mother had been damaged by a dubious fad diet. Sometimes those tragedies happen to little fanfare. An infant may have been permanently damaged by parents on a vegan diet because they read weird claims by Yogic flying instructors saying it must be healthy.

Where are journalists when all that is happening? Obviously Science 2.0 was created because journalists were not doing a very good job - this communications part of Science 2.0 was created so that scientists could be journalists. The prose may not be perfect but the science is solid. Science journalism jobs have plummeted because the public no longer trusts science journalists even as interest and education about science remains high.  In a 2010 AAAS panel, Pallab Ghosh of BBC News in London said it was climate change that drove science journalism out of existence, not corporate greed. Around 2002, journalism about global warming became about defending science, or about cheerleading for science. That is not the role of journalism, yet it is common today for some in science journalism, and less often, but still occasionally, in science itself, to say journalists need to do more of it. Because climate change is just too important not to be advocates.

Well, you can't be an advocate and be a trusted guide. 

Adams covers the whole range of science issues that have been manipulated by environmental groups and sympathetic journalists. Neonicotinoids gets a mention, as part of the 'sell the sizzle, not the steak' mode of environmental journalism. But even journals don't get a free pass. Adams mentions my article in the Wall Street Journal criticizing the esteemed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for letting a friend of a research hand-walk an article past real peer review. Though the study contained no data, being in PNAS got the attention of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the New York Times will almost print their press releases verbatim. That got the attention of politicians, a special assessment was convened about the pesticide, and then the product was...cleared. Nothing happened. It passed the special assessment, then regular reregistration, then another special assessment, and another since.

The journal had never seen any data. No one has seen it, but the study was published anyway because pesticides and corporations must be bad. And journalists ate it up.

But blogging and social media have now bypassed the Fourth Estate.