The media’s rocky relationship with science didn’t improve in 2008. The British newspaper Telegraph reported that red wine causes breast cancer, and then reported that red wine prevents breast cancer just two months later. A few news sources reported that a “pixie dust” could help people regrow their fingers, which isn’t very likely. Ben Goldacre takes the hacks to task in his Bad Science blog, and he’s compiled some of the worst science offenders in a special, year-end post.
Goldacre also takes on the obfuscating drug and PR companies, and the incompetence of governments and regulators. “It’s only when you line these jokers up side by side,” Goldacre writes, “that you realise what a vast and unwinnable fight we face.”
