On Cosmic Variances is a nice discussion about the badscience article: Don't dumb me down.
Actually I don't like many of the science journalism out there—at least these which are trying to dumb me down. There are many journals and TV sessions just for that. Here in Germany most (or all?) of the private TV stations have some formats where they try to sell scientific sensations. As they just show sensations, you can get many things wrong if you don't know nothing about it.
But why is it? Because journalists are not interested in “real” scientific results but just in sensations?
Well, I think yes, but not because they're not interested personally, but because they have to sell their product and actually I think many people are just interested in the sensation and not in the scientific facts. And I have experienced, that many people just expect not to understand scientific facts regardless how they are presented (so they stick to sensations). It's all about market and to abandon this practise is pretty hard. I do agree, that a bit more scientific facts (nicely written) would help and that we all need this.
But isn't this a problem for all journalism? You always have to pick the sources you'll like. And honestly, for scientific news and articles you have at least a chance to get some well written articles not dumbing you down!
Badscience is a very interesting blog; BTW these texts are published in an Guardien column.
I intend to write something about "jargon", which is essential to communicate in all science disciplines. Science journalism tries to explain while trying to prevent use of the jargon, probably rightfully, but I believe the loss of precision adds to the "dumbing down" feeling.
If you really want to explain science, you have to come up with very different analogies. Think about how Sir Eddington explained relativity in very common language.
OTOH I think bad interpretation or representation of scientific data, is <em>really</em> bad science. :-)
Think of the many statistical data which can be interpreted in gazillion of ways - especially when just imported in an Excel sheet. My favourite (and really hilarious one) is really this:
http://www.venganza.org/pir...
The last one is good, really ;-). I once read an interesting book about how to present data to get the reaction you want to get... (W. Krämer: So lügt man mit Statistik [How to lie using statistics]).
The problem is not only to come up with new analogies (which is very difficult for someone working on a topic for ages), but that most often scientific result are just presented as headline. Most often you get the impression, that this is a new unalterable law. Just to write something absolutely contrary next week...