All the news that’s unfit to print

Of all the Categories of Fake News, Health News is the Worst” ran a recent headline in The Atlantic (see http://bit.ly/IMTMuiris). According to Kelly McBride, vice-president of the Poynter Institute, the current journalistic environment of quick story turnover creates additional problems for science news because “the cycle of journalism and the cycle of science are completely incompatible”. McBride suspects health news may be at a tipping point of bad information, where the audience distrusts the marketplace of ideas, which she says “is really dangerous when it comes to healthcare”. Another source of false news are the websites that deliberately create…