Everyone knows the news is full of hyperbole. At the very least, everyone professes to know this, but newspapers and TV stations still make great money reporting a murder on every streetcorner, a controversy in every classroom, and a groundbreaking scientific discovery every Teusday. I’m not going to claim I’m less susceptible to media hyperbole than other people; I’ve fallen for it too, plenty of times. But I did want to take a blogpost to point out the ways that, in the niche of science I’ve chosen to write about, it shows up time after time, damaging the field in the process.
For one recent example of a misleading headline, take Phys.org’s article hailing the discovery of the Abelisaur Tralkasaurus: Argentine researchers find distant Tyrannosaurus relative. Now, this one is more of a distortion than an outright lie- Abelisaurs, as theropods, are technically relatives of Tyrannosaurs if we go back far enough in the family tree. If we look at the most complete theropod phylogeny available, we see that Abelisaurs diverge from Tetanurae, the group containing most other theropods, including all modern birds, pretty far back- not too long after the theropod clade initially evolved. In other words, Traklasaurus is less related to Tyrannosaurus than modern birds are. It would be more accurate for Phys.org to describe a newly discovered living songbird as a “distant Tyrannosaurus relative”.
Again, this one isn’t a full-blown lie. The headline is trying to generate excitement for Tralkasaurus, and the researchers involved, by attaching it to the coattails of a more famous dinosaur discovery. For a more damaging example of a headline inventing complete fiction (though the damage is not readily apparent), we can look at the announcement of Ken Lacovera et. al’s 2014 discovery of Dreadnoughtus schrani.
Dreadnoughtus, one of the many giant Titanosaurs of cretaceous Argentina, was published with a fascinating superlative. With 70% of the postcranial skeleton uncovered, it was, in the words of Lacovera’s original paper abstract, “the most complete giant titanosaur yet discovered”. However, this was apparently not enough of a record for ABC to find worth reporting. Instead, the announcement of the discovery heralded as "possibly the world's largest", in ABC and other media outlets. This claim was spread throughout the science-reporting world; in a 2017 National Geographic article describing the discovery of Patagotitan, they wrote “Patagotitan just edges out the previous “largest dinosaur ever,” another titanosaur called Dreadnoughtus.”
The problem, of course, is that Lacovara and colleagues never claimed Dreadnoughtus was the biggest dinosaur ever, anywhere in their original paper. Originally estimated at 59 tons and 85 feet long (later weight estimates put it closer to the 40 ton range), it was certainly a very large dinosaur, but not bigger than Argentinasaurus, Supersaurus, or a few others previously known. And the problem with this distortion, or at least the systemic issue it exemplifies, goes beyond simply giving people a wrong idea of what the biggest dinosaur was. The idea that every new discovery must have a superlative attached to it in order to be worth reporting on creates significant problems for scientific publishing as a whole.
For a while now, it has been known that research is suffering from a replication crisis. Around 70% of researchers surveyed reported trying and failing to replicate another researcher’s published results. While the exact numbers vary, this phenomenon appears to be pretty much consistent across the sciences, from pharmacology to psychology. That is to say, it appears that many studies are being published with flimsy/hard-to-support conclusions. A major reason is that the economy of research is dependent on grants, and positive, groundbreaking research results inspire more grants, allowing for more research to be conducted. Scientists are thus forced to play this game of (often unconsciously) exaggerating their findings in order to stay afloat, and continue their careers. So when the media plays into this, by hyperbolizing results even more, and changing findings to be more “record-breaking”, the result is a culture that keeps researchers in fear of getting “unimpressive” results, as though those results don’t inevitably occur sometimes when following the scientific method.
For another example of this “inventing world records” phenomenon (an awfully goofy one), we can look at The Conversation’s headline announcing the 2014 discovery of Leinkupal. Leinkupal, from early Cretaceous Argentina, was the latest-living known Diplodocid, surviving the mysterious disappearance from the fossil record of its relatives. This made Leinkupal a pretty notable find, so much so that it’s genus name is Mapuche for “vanishing family”. How did The Conversation report this? Found: the dinosaur that survived mass extinction. It did survive an extinction, but the implication of this headline, that Leinkupal survived the K-T extinction, isn’t even close to true. This example isn’t as egregious as the last one, where information was outright made up, but you do have to wonder how the researchers behind the discovery would feel about it being turned into clickbait.
Another favorite way to amplify misinformation for clicks is the time-honored technique of presenting one person’s left-field opinion as something that “experts say”. For an example of this in paleontological reporting, we can turn to the headlines relating to the theories pushed by Brian Ford.
Mr. Ford is the sole driver behind what is, if the paleontology meme group I’m part of on Facebook is any indication, the most heavily mocked theory in modern paleontology. That being the claim that 1800s scientists were right and dinosaurs were mostly aquatic after all, with their extinction having taken place as a result of the bodies of water where they fed and mated drying up (this is commonly called the Sex Lake Theory).
It goes without saying that the Sex Lake Theory has never been taken seriously by any actual paleontologists (Ford himself does not hold any paleontology-related degrees). Nonetheless, having a theory this radical and novel presented by someone with science credentials meant a flurry of sex-lake articles from an eager media as soon as Ford published his book on the topic, Too Big To Walk. Now, none of the outlets I found which ran articles on Ford's theory (The Sun, Fox, The Daily Star, The Week UK, Singapore Business Times) are particularly reputable. What they are, however, is widely read. So when the Daily Star runs a headline reading Dinosaurs not killed by asteroid but by 'shortage of SEX LAKES, a significant number of readers could be mislead into believing that this is the new scientific consensus, rather than the opinion of a lone outlier.
(Dr. Ford's magnum opus. Look inside for some hot and steamy lake action)
What harm is done by Fox and The Sun’s readership being mislead into believing the Sex Lake theory? Probably nothing tangible. It does, however, speak to a larger trend in the way new theories and discoveries are reported on. This trend, which has existed in some form for hundreds of years, is the tendency to see scientific progress as largely being the result of individual auteur-type geniuses, rather than teams of researchers carefully evaluating and reevaluating one another’s work. This is basically a version of the Great Man model of history- the idea that progress is driven forwards not by systems or the will of the masses, but more so by heroic individuals. The Great Man scientist has been a fixture of pop-culture forever, from Doc Brown to Tom Swift to Mr. Fantastic. They make for good fiction- a movie about Doc Brown’s time machine undergoing peer review would be pretty boring. But when reporting on real people and real theories, the Great Man model allows one “expert’s” claims to be given the same weight as a hypothesis tested and reproduced consistently. Brian Ford is recast as a vanguard against the stodgy establishment, and the economy of hyperbolic new claims remains active.
Sources:
Cerroni, M.A.; Motta, M.J.; Agnolín, F.L.; Aranciaga Rolando, A.M.; Brissón Egli, F.; Novas, F.E. (2020). "A new abelisaurid from the Huincul Formation (Cenomanian-Turonian; Upper Cretaceous) of Río Negro province, Argentina". Journal of South American Earth Sciences
Hendrickx, C.; Hartman, S.A.; Mateus, O. (2015). "An Overview of Non- Avian Theropod Discoveries and Classification". PalArch's Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology
Lacovara, Kenneth J.; Ibiricu, L. M.; Lamanna, M. C.; Poole, J. C.; Schroeter, E. R.; Ullmann, P. V.; Voegele, K. K.; Boles, Z. M.; Egerton, V. M.; Harris, J. D.; Martínez, R. D.; Novas, F. E. (September 4, 2014). "A Gigantic, Exceptionally Complete Titanosaurian Sauropod Dinosaur from Southern Patagonia, Argentina". Scientific Reports.
Gallina, P. A.; Apesteguía, S. N.; Haluza, A.; Canale, J. I. (2014). "A Diplodocid Sauropod Survivor from the Early Cretaceous of South America". PLoS ONE.
Baker, Monya (25 May 2016). "1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility". Nature. Springer Nature. 533: 452–454
Yong, Ed. “Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Running Out of Excuses”. The Atlantic 2018.
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