Science writers’ reactions to a medical “breakthrough” story
Section snippets
Method
“Nasw-talk,” the core email discussion group of NASW, is intended for discourse about “almost any subject of relevance to science writers and science writing” (National Association of Science Writers, 1998). Subscriptions to “nasw-talk” are open to anyone, not just NASW members. A person who joined “nasw-talk” would receive a copy of any message posted to the list, and could email a reply which would in turn be distributed to all other subscribers. An archive of past “nasw-talk” postings is
Author to postings ratios
The number of postings per author ranged from 1 to 32 with a median of 2. The author to postings ratios of the 21 coding categories ranged from 1 : 1.0 to 1 : 2.2 with a mean of 1 : 1.4. Thus, the opinions of high-volume posters were not disproportionately represented in this analysis.
Critiques of the Times article
Of the 208 critiques directed at the Times article, 83% were negative (Table 1). In total, 45 authors posted negative critiques of the article, and 22 authors posted positive critiques. Only 15 of the 45 authors who
Discussion
In general, the science writers who took part in the NASW email discussion responded negatively to the Times article, and their evaluations became increasingly unfavorable as questions about the story's accuracy and the reporter's motives for writing it were raised. The public misunderstanding generated by the Times story was one of the repercussions most frequently mentioned. Furthermore, participants attributed the lion's share of the responsibility for the premature and false hope created by
Acknowledgements
This study was supported in part by a Cancer Prevention and Control Training grant (5 R25 CA78447) from the National Cancer Institute. The authors express their gratitude to the National Association of Science Writers for their support of this study and to Michael Burgoon, Ph.D., and the Social Science and Medicine reviewers for their valuable critiques of this manuscript.
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