I have occasionally complained about the poor quality of science journalism in mainstream newspapers. Here’s an post by Ben Goldacre that illustrates the extent of the problem.

Not only does the Telegraph completely misrepresent the research they were reporting, and quote its author out of context to support their erroneous report, they also blocked his comments when he tried to post a correction.

I’ve become increasingly annoyed at the way that British newspaper web sites use comment threads to allow them to “publish” hate speech that would never be allowed in their original articles, all in the name of “controversy”. Now we discover that when they get things wrong they censor attempts to put them right. Not very responsible, is it?

(The US is, of course, a different matter, as it has freedom of speech legislation.)